Reparo
by Solstice Muse
Summary: When Ron has a terrible accident his wife has to help him through a long and hard recovery. Not everything can be fixed with a flick of a wand. How does a young mother explain to her little ones why Daddy can't come home? Post DH epilogue.
1. Chapter 1

Based upon the story of Richard and Mindy Hammond. The plot and some dialogue is quoted from their book On the Edge. I want to give full credit to the portions of the book that I adapted.

My Ron-aThon fic for the winning bidder, my old friend, Jedipabst. I hope he feels he got his money's worth!

* * *

**Reparo**

There was a Chaser called Beardsley who used to play for the Chudley Cannons. He was my hero. I used to listen to different teams on the wireless with my Dad and most of my brothers and just used to enjoy myself.

My brother, Charlie, was the biggest Quidditch fan of us all back then and, because of my swayability, would sit me on his knee and tell me that 'This afternoon, Ronnie, you want the Wasps to win, all right?' and I would get excited because I had a team to cheer. Charlie and I would sit and cheer together and Mum or Percy would complain that we were making too much noise, but soon enough, Dad would pop in to ask for updates and Bill would jeer that the Wasps had no chance.

Fred and George would re-enact the game as the commentator announced it and everybody would end up delighted when Charlie's pick for the day was successful and rant about bad refereeing when they weren't.

One of Dad's friends from work was good for freebies every now and then. We got to use his cottage by the seaside for a week long holiday in the summer and sometimes Dad would get a good deal on things like chessmen and toys at Christmas.

Bill tended to get lumbered with babysitting, so he'd prefer to leave us younger ones be when he didn't have to be in charge; I can't blame him really. Charlie was getting too old to indulge me and Percy didn't want to play the fun stuff I wanted to play, although he did like to play chess with me and would help me with difficult words when I was learning to read. So I was left with the twins and Ginny.

My twin brothers were the bane of my young life for many years. They got me into so much trouble and when I wasn't in trouble, it was because they were usually for doing some mean spirited thing to me. Basically, it was your typical sibling relationship.

Why did I put up with it? Well, little kids are idiots, great, big, gullible idiots, and Fred and George were devious beyond measure. While they got me into trouble and upset me more times than I can count, they were enormous fun and they always let me play with them. Yes, there were usually ulterior motives and half the time I knew it, but I still went along with them because there was somebody who wanted to play with me, and that's all little boys want, isn't it?

Ginny would sometimes play, too, but she had a habit of telling on the twins, so the real mischief was boys only. Poor Gin, she was always there for me when they upset me or were angry with me for getting them scolded by Mum. Ginny was my friend as well as my sister and she would play with me because she liked me and thought I was funny. She was also a girl, though, and sometimes she wanted to play with tea sets and dollies and I couldn't be seen playing like that!

Notice I said I couldn't be _seen _playing like that, not that I never did -- and that is the last I will ever speak of that.

Now Dad's friend got him two tickets to a Quidditch match and gave them to Dad. The Burrow was buzzing with excitement until it was revealed what match the tickets were for.

"Cannons versus Hornets!" Dad had declared and Charlie's excited face had fallen like a lead Quaffle.

"Dad, a match between Fred and George would be better than _that_," he humphed.

The twins beamed with pride and Bill snorted before declining the tickets to the 'Dud game of the season.' Percy wasn't interested and taking one twin without the other wasn't an option, so I was next in line.

Dad had barely drawn in the breath he needed to ask me when I started bouncing around the kitchen with delight.

I was going to see a real Quidditch match. I was going to watch a game for myself and not listen to somebody else telling me what was happening. I had never been so excited in my life.

After badgering Charlie for instructions on who I should support, I was told that there was only one decent player on either team and that was Beardsley.

"Beardsley," I said, chuffed to bits that I knew one of the players' names, a player I was going to see flying around for real, and followed Charlie around asking question after question until he dumped an armful of old Quidditch magazines into my arms and told me to look up the old Puddlemere match reports.

"Beardo used to play for a decent team when he was younger, 'past it' now, that's why the Cannons have got him." Charlie helped me back out of his bedroom with my arms full and then wished me luck before closing the door with a shake of the head.

I read all about Puddlemere and 'Beardo.' I tried and failed to find any report on the Cannons that wasn't a joke or a cartoon of a pair of blind Beaters clubbing the Snitch to pieces, with absolutely no success, and I then learned all about every team in the league.

I had some old paint sets, and so did Ginny, and the two of us set about painting my bedroom walls with orange splodges that were supposed to be players and a yellow splodge to represent the Golden Snitch.

Mum went spare about that and threatened to punish me by not letting me go to the match but I cried and she's always been a sap for me crying. I admit now that I am totally at fault for the 'baby boy' treatment she gave me because I played up on it when I needed to. Anyway, the big day came and Dad took me by Floo to the Cannons' clubhouse.

That was it for me. I was gone. It didn't matter that the Keeper fumbled the Quaffle, the Beaters swung and missed the Bludgers, or that the Seeker was watching the other Seeker rather than looking for the Snitch. All that mattered to me was that I recognised the face of Beardsley and I cheered for him as he managed to score the only goals of the afternoon.

He had a face like a bull terrier chewing a bee and he was my hero.

Neither of the two Seekers was anywhere close to catching the Snitch and the score was even. It was dark and very late, so Dad picked me up and carried me back to the Floo, me tiredly grizzling the whole way that I wanted to stay to the end, and I don't even remember being put to bed that night. I do remember dreaming about flying around on a broom and playing Quidditch and how fantastic I thought the Cannons were.

That was how they became my team and how I dedicated my whole life to inevitable sporting disappointment.

My wife, Hermione, used to tell me I was going into 'Muggins mode' whenever I got into my despondent state of resignation to failure. I just let her read what I have written so far and she rolled her eyes at me and said, "And there you go into Muggins mode."

Well, yes, I did have a problem with nerves and confidence when I started playing competitive Quidditch at school, but with a best friend like Harry being devious and a certain future wife like Hermione throwing her scruples out the window and helping me out, I was soon growing in self- assurance until I could step onto the pitch on the day of a match having not once vomited.

So back to the point of this trip down memory lane; I was, from that moment onward, an obsessive about the game of Quidditch.

When you find your obsession so early in life, you feed your passion through play and daydreams of the fantastic. I would mock up a mini indoor Quidditch pitch in the house and bat brussel sprouts through homemade hoops until something got broken and I was told to play outside.

When outside, I would put a fallen branch between my legs and run around pretending to fly. I'd re-enact dramatic incidents from past Cannons games but change the outcomes so my team would win. All this fantasy play led to two infamous events in Weasley family history: the breaking of my brother Fred's toy broomstick and the loss of my beloved teddy bear, Beardo.

I straddled the broomstick.

My course was set up precisely and I had every twist and turn memorised. I had even done two dry runs with a branch between legs to make sure I was ready to lean into the hairpin around the cherry tree and pull out at speed.

This had been prepared for days and now, finally, Fred was busy gluing my other brother, Percy's bedroom door closed with him still in it. Now was my chance.

I passed by Fred's bedroom door, open as always, and casually grabbed the handle of his toy broomstick, without breaking my stride, and carried on down the stairs, nobody noticing me or what I had in my hand.

The reason nobody noticed me was because I wasn't running. It took years for me to understand this, but running is the one thing that will get you stopped and questioned in my family. Walking quietly makes you invisible.

I was invisible and in possession of a broom!

I stood astride the miniature broomstick and felt it begin to rise beneath me to support my weight. I stroked my palm down the smooth handle with reverence for the craftsmanship, just as I'd seen Charlie doing on his adult- sized broom.

I focused on my course and kicked off from the ground.

Hairpins can be difficult.

Fred wasn't happy. My teddy bear was even less happy. Despite the grazed knees, bent-back finger, and bloody mouth, I wasn't deterred from flying. I could have developed a phobia, only there was something worse to happen that day that overpowered any fear of flying.

The only way my true phobia could interfere with me flying would be if a spider was crawling along the handle of my broom. Arachnophobia is terrible, but easily avoidable when hundreds of feet in the air. Flying was always the perfect escape, and not just from spiders.

* * *

On Wednesday 19th February 2007, I was crapping myself.

Strange to think that, having been an Auror for nine years, I was still capable of being petrified of harmless things like failure and rejection.

Ask me to storm a Death Eater stronghold blind and I would do it before I'd finished tying my bootlaces. But ask me to talk to a group of young trainees about how to be a good Auror and I'd feel like a second look at my breakfast was coming upon me.

I got home from work one evening, took baby Rosie off her mother's hands and listened to everything she had to tell me about her day before answering all her questions about mine, and once my little girl had been fed and put down to sleep, I dealt with my post.

One of the letters was an official-looking thing from the department and Hermione began jumping to conclusions about all the different promotions or desk jobs I could be being offered. I broke through the wax seal with the stamp of the head of the Auror department on it and frowned.

Harry was the head of the Auror department. Why was he writing to me instead of nudging me in the side as we changed back into our civvies at the end of the day? I was just voicing this to Hermione when my nosey little sister's head appeared in the fireplace and looked from me to my wife, expectantly.

"Well?" she demanded.

"Well, what?" I shrugged.

Ginny looked at Hermione again and then huffed.

"Come over and help me kill him. I told him you'd kill him -- you've got a baby, for goodness sake. I don't know what he was thinking."

And with that, my sister's head was gone and the flames were orange once again.

Hermione sat down and waited for me to open the letter.

"Come on then, Ginny knows, we might as well know."

I could see that all her hopes for me sitting behind a desk, wearing a tie and filing things, were gone and now she was anxious to find out why she was due to murder her best friend.

I opened the letter and read.

Me and my wife are an odd match, there's no denying it, and yes, she does get excited when I dress up smartly or sit at the table until the early hours doing my paperwork, but she likes it when I'm enjoying myself, too. I can't ever say she doesn't worry about what happens to me while I'm enjoying myself; that would be a lie, but she still encourages me to follow my own aspirations rather than her aspirations for me.

I love her for that.

I love any woman who will clean blood out of my lucky Cannons' t-shirt so I can wear it to the game on Saturday, without ever once asking me how or why the blood got there. All she says is 'Do I need to worry?' and I show her where I'd got hurt and she sees that it's fine and then gives me a crying child to deal with as penance. I sometimes think it's also her reminder to me to be more careful: 'Here, look what you have now, don't let her down'.

So it was with a heavy heart that I handed her the letter and watched her read, ready for her to dismiss my even applying for the position that had become open on the grounds that I was a father, a husband and a clumsy git.

"Go for it," she said as she put the letter down on the table and looked me in the eye.

"You do get what the Aerial Combat Division is, right?" I asked her, thinking maybe she'd read the acronym and thought I was being invited to try-out for a job involving Muggle CDs.

"Yes, I've seen their displays at important functions, they're like the Red Arrows, only on brooms instead of in planes," she smiled, airily.

"Yeah but," I changed seats to move around the table closer to her, taking her hand with mine, "this isn't a broomstick display team, this is an air combat division. This is fighting in the air, while riding a broom, dueling on brooms, love."

She gave me the most glowing smile and loving kiss on the lips since she told me she was expecting Rosie and said that she knew what the job involved and that she thought I would be perfect for it.

"I still remember what Tonks said about you when we were smuggling Harry out of his aunt and uncle's house," she said, as she reminded me of the gushing praise bestowed upon me by a great Auror and friend, Nymphadora Tonks, after I was paired up with her to divert the mid-air ambush away from Harry. "She was a professional and you were a seventeen-year-old student who hadn't taken his NEWTs yet and she thought you were fantastic."

"Well, I still haven't taken my NEWTs," I said, bashfully.

She laughed at me before reassuring me that I should at least try.

"Dueling on a broom involves talent and skill and isn't something to practice and learn," she assured me. "You have the talent and skill already, you're a natural in the air and a fantastic flyer."

"Harry's a fantastic flyer," I corrected. "Seekers are the best flyers in the world."

"True, but a Seeker is gifted at speed and turning on a sixpence. Ask a Seeker to fly at full tilt, catch something and throw it at a specific target while avoiding attacks from all sides, and they wouldn't be able to do it. Seekers excel when they are focused upon one task but it takes a remarkable Keeper to multi-task and excel at every one of them."

"So, what you're saying is...Harry's nowhere near as good as me at Quidditch?" I grinned.

"I didn't say that!"

"Well, you're going to," I insisted. "Get in the Floo now, go over there and tell him what you just told me. Tell Ginny, too! I want to piss her off as well!"

So, I was, as I said before, crapping myself.

I had a preliminary interview with, awkwardly enough, Harry and with the Division Leader, a stout man called Bigglesworth. It turned out to be more of a relaxed, informal chat rather than an interview and Harry kept me comfortable enough to say one or two things to make Division Leader Bigglesworth laugh, and not long afterwards, I was told to change into flying gear and meet them out on the field for an airborne trial.

I went to my locker and looked at the brand new black leather riding boots that Hermione had bought me for the trial, and moved them to one side to reach for my battered and worn brown, leather lace-ups.

The new boots were pull-ons and there was something about the moment of enforced sitting down to lace them up that always relaxed me. It was the mixture of concentration, rhythm, and routine that helped me focus without winding me up into a bundle of nerves.

I wound the laces up the hooks, tightening the soft leather around my shin, and past my calf. It was while lacing up boots once that I finally understood what it was my mother found so relaxing about knitting. The fluid repetitive motion, the laces sliding through my fingers, it was all strangely calming.

I closed my locker and took a couple of deep breaths before grabbing my broom and striding out to the field behind the Auror training facility.

It was a bright, fresh day and I felt totally calm. I was going for a fly, after all, and I loved flying. Harry nodded at me before pointing upwards at the sky and twirling his finger around in an oval shape twice.

"Fast as you can, please mate," he said before looking to the Division leader and listening to something. "And after that, can you do a vertical figure eight and keep the loops as narrow as you can?"

"Righty-ho," I said, blinking in shock at saying that for the first time at such a moment, and then swung my leg over my broom. "So, did you want that at high speed as well?"

"Yes, please," Bigglesworth called back.

I kicked off from the ground and shot into the air like a dart.

I had the utmost confidence in my broom and braked cleanly in mid-air before leaning to shoot off and begin my first oval.

I could afford the highest quality boom on the market by now; days of customising Harry's hand-me-downs every time he upgraded were long gone, but I'd discovered another therapeutic pleasure to do with flying. I was quite adept at rebuilding old broomsticks from scratch.

I'd started off by taking Tonks' old broomstick from her mother and making it safe for Teddy to ride. I could identify the wood used for the bristles and gathered enough to replace the broken and loose ones that caused a drag and hampered the handling on sharp turns. I cut them all to the right length and fixed them in place before stripping the varnish from the handle and then treating it with linseed oil and re-varnishing it to a smooth finish.

Andromeda was really pleased with it and soon enough, word got around and people were bringing me their old favourite brooms that they'd had to replace years back, and paying me a little something to restore them to the standards of the present day.

George soon caught on and we went into business together, him taking one order per month for a restoration, and me sanding and clipping away in the back room on my days off. It helped out with extra money during Hermione's pregnancy and the first year of Rosie's very expensive life I can tell you, but it also brought in a lot of extra business for George.

People would book months in advance to get their broom remodelled or restored and George soon had the idea that advance bookings could only be made if you had a full book of stamps from any of the Wheezes shops across the country. Every time you made a purchase over a Galleon, you would get a stamp and there were twelve stamps to a book.

Crafty one, my brother. He guaranteed himself twelve separate visits and at least twelve Galleons just to make an advance booking.

The latest Cirrus Supremacy was on the market, and yet the Seekers for England, Scotland and Ireland were all riding Weasley-remodelled brooms. Wales didn't just have their Seeker riding a Nimbostratus which I had reshaped the handle and replaced the brush of, but the whole team were using their favourite classic brooms that I'd brought up to competitive standard.

Being the first name in Broomstick restoration, Harry had me rebuild his Firebolt from the fragments we retrieved from Death Eaters who'd kept pieces of it as trophies after he'd lost it in the ambush. I hadn't much to work with, but I found the right kind of wood and twigs. I even rewove the frayed rope strands with newer strands when fastening the bristles in place. I clipped everything cleanly, used all the splinters in the core of the handle and pressed and varnished the willow around it.

Harry had something of his broom back. It meant a lot to him because of Sirius and because of what he'd accomplished on it. I didn't have a special connection to any broom, so I bought a wreck of a one at a Quidditch auction; it was Beardsley's broom from my first-ever Quidditch match, and it was a beautiful one from way back when Quidditch players all rode brooms that had been made for them personally.

It took me a year-and-a-half but I restored it and remodelled it so that it cut through the air as clean as if it had been custom-made for a Seeker, but kept it as strong as it had been for its former owner, the Cannons' Chaser. I added extra bristles to make the brush thicker, but shaped the brush into an 'S' shaped curve to streamline it. It added the extra heft so I could use the broom as a club if I spun it around fast enough.

Anyway, I know I'm going off track. I could talk about restoring classic brooms all day and this isn't the story of broomstick maintenance. This is all leading up to explain how I ended up in hospital with brain damage.

Oh, did I spoil it for you? Did you not read the _Prophet_ at all last year? Oops!

Back to my big day -- dazzling the man whose job I was to take over when he retired a year later, and I was whistling through the air on my second oval. I decided to change direction upwards with my favourite corkscrew manoeuvre, twisting so the wind worked against the curved tail of the broom like a propeller beneath the water and I burst upwards with extra thrust.

I was already leaning backwards to go back on myself and cross over to make the lower half of my figure eight and the turn was so tight I wondered if my loops were going to be too narrow to see. I sped downwards to the ground as if I was racing gravity and leaned back, pulling up on the handle, and kicked out the tail so Harry and Bigglesworth had their robes blown back with the force.

I burst back up and into the sky, soaring to my starting position before flicking one heel and spinning the broom one hundred and eighty degrees to a dead stop.

There were other tests, but I could tell from the animated way the division leader was talking to Harry, that I was now a front-runner.

Later, I found out he was actually asking Harry, 'When can he start?' and could I bump him up the waiting list so his son's broom could be upgraded by his seventeenth birthday. I went home to find Hermione glowing with happiness and quite tearful.

"Did they owl already?" I asked her, excitedly.

She shook her head and walked towards me, unable to find words, took my hand and placed it on her belly. An owl did come that day, offering me the job, but we didn't notice it until the next morning. We had real celebrating to do.

So this brings us to our little family set up at the time of the accident. There was me, my two wonderful girls, and little Hugo. There was my job in aerial combat, which sometimes involved being important with Harry in meetings and sometimes taking part in acrobatic displays of close formation flying, along with my paid hobby of tinkering with broomsticks.

All in all, I had a really good life.

I often find people, especially people who have young families of their own, asking me why I would have participated in such a foolish stunt. I don't deny that I get a kick out of pushing my limits, the buzz of flying, and activities that get my heat racing, but I must point out that I've never been reckless. I won't let the stunt team do a display unless I am sure that safety measures are properly implemented and stewards are positioned beneath the airspace in case of unforeseen circumstances. I won't let a customer take their broom away after I've worked on it unless I flew on it myself and made sure it was air-worthy. I do everything I can to keep everybody I'm responsible for as safe as possible.

I am responsible for myself, too.

I remember once pointing out that Ginny had less safety precautions when she played for the Harpies than I did during a twelve person display over very pointy rocks. Strangely enough, Ginny retired soon after and spent a solid month glaring at me, when she wasn't glaring at Harry, and Hermione found herself torn between feeling glad that Ginny was giving up her injury-prone career to be a full-time mother of three and defending my sister's right to be in just as dangerous a job as her brother was.

So...

"I've got a great idea!"

George's participation in the aerial display planning meetings always resulted in this exclamation, followed by weeks of preparation and safety precautions that he found boring and didn't want to be a part of.

"It's a belter, the best!"

"Go on, then," I said, adopting my best crotchety old man pose to indulge him.

"Why don't you just go really fast?" he said, pausing to wait for the explosion of enthusiasm that never came. "The fastest you've ever gone. I'm not talking about a race or anything complicated. I just mean a demonstration of just how fast a broom can go, straight-line speed."

"I've flown at two hundred miles an hour," I said with a shrug, "and have you seen the sky, George? The Muggles take up a lot of room up there with their machines. Go too fast to navigate and I'll plough right into a hairyplane."

"I'm not talking stupid distance fast," George said with a tut. "It's not like you'll be setting a record. Well, maybe you could be the fastest Weasley ever, or the fastest aerial display team. How about that?"

He'd caught me. The team perked up on seeing my brother winning me over, and I leaned forward to listen to the rest of George's idea.

Someone had once challenged me to make their broom sub-aquatic, so they could fly it underwater as well as in the air, and after a mass proclamation that it couldn't be done, I built the thing and several others. Then, with the aid of lots of Gillyweed, me and the team performed one of our easier routines underwater while a massed crowd watched from Quidditch-style stands all around the lake.

I have to admit I was quite impressed with myself on that one; an aerial display where everybody had to look down to see it, and Hermione was full of pride at the logistics behind it all.

In the four years since I'd got the job, I'd made a name for myself as a celebrity daredevil. Because I could tweak a broom to do specific things that brooms can't ordinarily do, it always appeared as if I was taking a bigger risk than I actually was.

I flew a loop, one mile in diameter, with the brush of my broom on fire for a night-time display once. Everybody screamed and my mum whacked me around the back of the head. I pointed out that a burnt broom wouldn't fly and it was a specially-made broom with some of Hermione and George's expertise so that I could ignite heatless ornamental flames on the tail and fly for as long as I liked with no danger of being burned whatsoever.

I got another swat from my mother before George and Hermione were praised for being so clever. Sometimes, I just can't win.

I did get credit for my idea to show the Hogwarts students, and everybody who came to the annual fund-raiser for the war-widows and orphans of the Battle of Hogwarts, what to do to if your broom gets struck by lightning. It was a very thorough and informative demonstration that me and George thought would end fantastically well with me being hit with his artificial lightning and going into a nose dive into the crowd before stopping just short of them and showering them with a confetti of safety leaflets.

The kids loved it. Teddy and Victoire thought I was the most impressive person they knew, but Hermione practically beat me unconscious with rage because I'd neglected to inform her about the big finish being a stunt and not for real at all.

Like I said, it always looked like I was in more danger than I actually was. Safety is the key with us nutters in Aerial Combat and it always will be while I'm in charge.

So now, I was on my way back to Hermione with news of another stunt I was to undertake in the name of entertainment, fund-raising, and drumming up free publicity for the broom side of the business at Wheezes.

I arrived home and was, as usual, mobbed by animals and children as soon as I pushed the front door open. We had bought a house in the country when I had got the promotion as Division leader and had filled it with Rosie, who was now five, and Hugo, three, a turquoise Pygmy Puff, a beagle called Jeremy Beagle (a name which made every Muggle who heard it quite hysterical for reasons I will never understand) who was the Division mascot, the seemingly-immortal Crookshanks the cat and two owls called Hogwarts and Ahistory (now _that_ was my idea of a comical pet name).

Within twenty-four hours, I would be deep in a coma, my brain expanded dangerously within my skull, but right now I was sitting in the back garden of my little house, picking bits of Exploding Snap cards out of Jeremy Beagle's fur. It was strangely soothing work and I let my mind wander to the high-speed broom I would be flying the following day.

I tried to imagine unleashing the power of twelve thousand horses in one huge hit of adrenaline-bursting speed and couldn't get anywhere near. This would be a whole new experience. We'd decided to make no attempt at a target speed. I was simply to let lose and ride as fast as I felt the broom was able to go safely. Because of the G-forces involved, I would be wearing a protective helmet.

At Elfington Field, a large expanse of countryside surrounded by Muggle deterrents, a small base was set up at one end. Our Aerial Display Team were gathered around, pulling on our gear. Surrounding the field, I saw stretches of dark, green coniferous forest in the distance. The land was flat and broad with a light wind blowing across it under a pale blue sky.

Boots laced up and protective gear in place, I strolled over to a small tent serving food and drink and ordered a cup of tea and a bacon sarnie. I chatted with a couple of people who were Emergency Healers and were there, as always, as representatives of St Mungo's in case of accidents. They were looking forward to seeing what went on when the flying aces performed one of their spectacular stunts for the crowd.

With tea in hand, I sought out a man called Scott, who was the event organiser, to see where he wanted me to set up the rocket broom. Scott wasn't our usual event organiser. Andy Womble was the mug who usually got lumbered with all the thankless tasks leading up to us bunch of show-offs stealing the show.

Scott asked me what time I thought would be best to go for it. I looked at the swelling crowd on either side of the field and saw that the ones on the right were squinting into the sun.

I pointed this out and said that I could do a run right away so the people on the left could get a clear view, the festivities could begin and then, once the sun had moved around, I could go again for the people who couldn't see the first time around.

"You could make it a 'see if we can go faster' type thing," Scott suggested.

"Well, we aren't really doing a speed trial," I said, cautiously. "But just for the sake of geeing up the crowd, I suppose you could."

"No," Scott raised both hands. "Andy said to go along with whatever you're comfortable with. I tell you what, after the first run, we'll plug the one-snap cameras we're selling to raise money for the Hogwarts student fund, you know, the one for kids who can't afford the school supplies?"

"Yeah," I said, nodding with interest for this new idea.

One-snap cameras were just what the name suggested, a camera that took one picture. The gimmick was that you left the camera for a minute after clicking the shutter and then pull the print out, a fully developed moving image.

"Well, they're only a Sickle each, so parents can buy them for their kids and we can tell them that we'll give a special prize, a...a...a thing I'll work out later."

"A signed Harry Potter Chocolate Frog card," I said, knowing Harry wouldn't mind if it was for a kid and for the Hogwarts fund.

"Yes! Thank you!" Scott said, with relief. "So the best one-snap picture of you flying on your second run gets a Potter Chocolate Frog card signed to them personally. Sound better than the competitive thing?"

"Much," I nodded as we walked to the rocket broom.

George was making sure it was in prime condition, not a twig out of place, and that the special infused oil he'd created to permeate every individual twig in the brush to give it extra kick wasn't tainted by any grit.

I'd shaped the handle to have a curved nose and a thick trunk, able to withstand the impact of the G-forces, and positioned the footrests 'just so' so my body would be as streamlined as possible against the shape of the broom.

"You ready?" George asked, excitedly.

"Yeah, just need to put on the headgear and we're away. We'll be going twice, once again at the end so the people with the sun in their eyes can get a chance, too."

"Ah, so thoughtful," George said as he ruffled my hair like a git.

I took my helmet from Scott and searched the crowd for Hermione and the kids, found them, and gave them a wave. The girls waved back and Hugo tried to look through his Omnioculars the wrong way around. I laughed and pulled the helmet over my head.

I was ready to go for it.

* * *

_A/N Thanks to Leviathan0999 and Deena for the beta work on this fic and to The Steppy One for all the read throughs._

_For those non-Brits reading this, there was a TV personality in this country called Jeremy Beadle and that is why Muggles find Ron's dog's name so hysterical._


	2. Chapter 2

**Reparo part 2**

I called for the area to be cleared then George shouted at the people behind me that they'd get blasted off their feet by the force of me kicking off. Scott gave the announcer the signal to start introducing the stunt to the crowd.

I couldn't hear anything through the helmet and over the sounds of the ground staff around me, so relied on Scott to make a signal to me when it was time to take off. So fierce was the acceleration that I had to start from the ground rather than take off and then shoot forward in mid-air. Everybody was being told where to look and warned that I was going to be fast and not to blink.

I rolled my eyes at being built up to be faster than a blink but it seemed to work as everybody was quiet and still, waiting for me to go. I heard a muffled announcement via a _Sonorous_ charm and just about made out my name. I gripped the handle of the broom and kicked off from the ground as hard as I could.

The acceleration was massive. I had expected a mind-warping blur of speed as I exploded away from the ground but this was different; it didn't feel ferocious or violent, just that I was submitting to the inevitable. It was an absolute force that I had no choice but to go along with.

Thirteen seconds into the ride, I was going faster than 200 miles per hour, although at the time there was no way of me knowing that, and making constant corrections to my course with the handle of the broom.

Because of the crosswind, I needed to apply a constant thirty degree alteration to keep myself straight. I hadn't anticipated how much this was going to be necessary. Neither had I anticipated how much information would be coming back through the vibrations of the broom handle.

I was very, very, busy.

I tried to keep my eyes focused on the destination, a spot packed with several cushioning charms and an air-thickening charm to slow me down on landing. Very soon, I would reach the point I had calculated was the perfect moment to lift my body away from the handle of the broom and pull up, causing as much drag as I could with the tail, in order to slow down and descend.

Tremors made their way through my hands and arms, the broom itself shifted slightly, and the ground hurtled by underneath in a blur of colour, sending vibrations through the whole broom and into me. The noise now was immense, my senses drowned in a constant scream, and my protective helmet was buffeted by an unimaginable force. To make matters worse, my visor was steaming up. Perhaps I was breathing too much, I thought.

I tried controlling my chest, pacing my breaths, feeling my throat shiver and contract. The visor misted more and then I saw the spot I'd marked to start pulling up. The tail caught the wind and began to cause drag, the broom shook and jerked from side to side beneath me as I made myself as big as possible to slow down. I pulled the nose around to point back the way we'd come in an attempt to create some reverse thrust.

I trusted the boom; it felt strong and steady now, and I raised my hand to wave and let everybody know everything had gone perfectly. While the crowd cheered, the announcer began explaining the competition for the children involving my second run later on it in the day. I turned the broom back towards the cushioning charms and let it dive for the landing area at a nice, leisurely eighty-five miles an hour.

This is why cushioning charms were necessary. That broom was not made to go slow at any time and besides, human judgement is deceptive after having gone so fast. Just because you've slowed down, it doesn't mean you've slowed down _enough_ to get off. A trainee found that out once, having ridden at one hundred and thirty miles an hour for two straight hours. He slowed down and skimmed along the ground, ready to pack it in for the day, and, believing himself to be almost at a standstill, hopped off at just under fifty MPH. Two broken legs and a broken clavicle led us to set up a new rule.

I you _think_ you're going slow enough to jump off, take a Knut out of your pocket and throw it ahead of you. If you overtake it, then you're not going slowly enough. We haven't had any accidents like that since.

The roaring of the broom had been mellowed into a more docile purr and I felt the air-thickening charm slow me down even more. I steered directly for the cushioning charms and felt the broom smoothly glide through them until it sighed to a springy halt and settled as if I'd landed on a thick, invisible mattress.

I threw my leg over the handle of the Rocket and rolled off and onto the cushioning charms. I rolled a second time and landed on my feet on the grass. I dragged off my protective helmet and felt cool air hit me like an ice cold shower. My hair was sticking up all over the place like Harry's does, and my legs felt heavy and clumsy now that I had to stand upon them.

Scott and George were flying towards me on their own brooms, beaming. George slapped me on the back and demanded to know everything about the run: what acceleration felt like, how it handled at full belt, and if the calculated stopping distance was correct. Scott was talking about how fast I'd gone, but I wasn't really listening to anything. My head felt like it had my heart in it and all I could make out was the pounding of it inside my skull.

George pulled out a bottle of water for me to drink and Scott picked up the broom, carrying it back to a cool, dry place to store it until the second run. After I'd downed all the water, George pulled a flask out of his robe and unscrewed the cap before pouring steaming hot tea into it for me.

"You brought me tea!" I said, as if I'd just been presented with all my birthday presents at once, and cradled the brew with both hands, as if it was my prize for what I'd just done.

We wandered back along the long, open space I'd covered in my high-speed trip and had shaken off my aerial display team robes and protection, handing them to one of the stewards to take back to the base camp for me. We went into the stands to find our families and enjoy the rest of the day as spectators until it was time to do it again.

Hugo was all over me and Rosie was describing everything I'd just done to me as if I'd missed it. Hermione dragged her fingers through my hair for a while, in an attempt to calm it down, but gave up and simply rested her head on my shoulder as the others on the display team did some really quality close formation work to music.

Hugo started to get a little grumpy and restless as the afternoon went on and Hermione said she'd take the kids home and see to all the animals, as they'd been left on their own all day.

I kissed her goodbye and told her what I fancied for dinner. She narrowed her eyes at me and asked me if I was planning on making the same dish for her, too. We laughed and then I kissed the kids goodbye and waved them off before having Al, Harry and Ginny's youngest boy, thrust upon me now that my hands were free.

This is how it worked in the Weasley family now days, if you're not holding a child already, then somebody will give you one. Charlie chatted to me about Quidditch, with Lily swinging around his thick trunk, while popping chips into my mouth when Al wasn't looking. Ginny kept hiding from me, Charlie and Angelina, who she had left James pestering, so she could have some peace and a sit down.

Soon enough, all the kids became pains and Mum and Dad took them all back to The Burrow. By the time I had to prepare for my second run, only George, Charlie and Harry remained.

On the way back, I discussed the problem about the visor steaming up with George and he told me that smearing a layer of soapy liquid over it would prevent that. He grabbed the helmet and wandered over to the equipment trunk to find something suitable while I asked where the broom was being kept.

Scott led me to the food and drink tent. There was a cooling charm on the inside of the tent and the broom was under a clean cover on the far side. I pulled back the sheet and scanned it for any signs of stress.

The wood was still strong; the bristles only needed minimal trimming, and I could still balance the thing perfectly on the palm on my hand. I sat down and pulled out my clippers to cut down the wayward bristles and then gripped the handle tightly with one hand and felt the vibrations travelling through it.

It was humming with perfect consistency and I knew that I was still able to entrust myself with the finely-tuned magical object. It was attuned to the air around it and ready to burst into an explosion of speed.

This was to be the first of the key things that went wrong.

Yes, the broom was perfectly adjusted to its surroundings. Unfortunately, its surroundings during my preliminary examination were the cool tent and I wasn't going to be flying in cool weather.

I carried the broom outside and positioned it as I had done before. I put on my protective padding and robes while Scott cast a temporary repelling charm around the broomstick so nothing from outside could interfere with the sensitive magical structure.

This was the second key thing to go wrong.

If there had been no repelling charm placed on the broom as it sat out in the late afternoon sunlight, George would have noticed the dampness forming in the bristles of the brush and the ride would have been called off. With the repelling charm, the broom maintained its state of dryness and coolness, the warmth from the sunlight being filtered out, which is something poor Scott continues to blame himself for.

The simple fact of the matter is that the broom always needs a repelling charm once uncovered and out in the open. He was following the safety measures to the letter and if he hadn't, then something else would have gone wrong as well as the twigs in the brush getting damp.

The helmet was ready and George assured me that the visor would be crystal-clear during the next run. I unlaced and re-laced my boots to make sure they were on tightly, and partly for my own therapeutic reasons, while George performed his final examination of the broom.

George is also one for kicking himself because of clearing the broomstick for flight, but at the time he examined it, there was still no moisture building up in the tail. There was one key reason for him not noticing that the broom was colder than it should have been and that has to do with him helping me out with my visor.

After George had found the right consistency of liquefied soap, smeared it onto the visor until it was dry and clear once again, he needed to wash his hands. He conjured a bowl full of water to rinse them in, seeing as they were already covered in soap, and the water had cooled his hands just enough so that he didn't notice the temperature of the broom when he gave it a final once-over.

Sometimes, no matter how careful you are about safety, you get unlucky. It was nobody's fault and nobody was negligent. I've always insisted friends and family make that clear when the accident comes up.

The crowd was whipped up into a suitable degree of excitement as I pulled the helmet on, fastening the chin strap underneath tightly, and this time I cast a cushioning charm around my neck to keep my head from being thrown around as much as last time. That moment of thought for my own comfort ended up, literally, saving my neck.

I climbed onto the broom, gripped the handle tightly and bent my knees in readiness to kick off from the ground once more. The team cleared the area around me, Scott made sure I was clear behind before moving right back himself, and George stood in my eye-line, ready to give me the signal to go.

There was a muffled roar from the crowd and George swung his arm around and up. I kicked away as hard as I could and instantly the awesome power of the broomstick threw itself and me forward.

I'd been flying on a consistently straight bearing for just over fourteen seconds, travelling at 288 miles per hour, and by the time my senses caught up with my pace enough to register what was going on, I realised something was wrong.

I was not experiencing the usual push and pull in the steering as I tried to keep the broom and its passenger heading in a straight line. Milliseconds passed and I was now battling something, counter-steering for all I was worth. My brain would later remember a sense of struggling to keep the broom handle pointing straight ahead, despite something trying to throw me off course and into the crowd.

Fourteen-and-a-half seconds now and the broom dropped fifty or so feet, straight down, and without looking behind me, I knew that pieces of the tail are splintering away. The fight just got a hell of a lot tougher. Something terrible had just happened and I knew I was in a lot of trouble. The broom dropped another ten feet at 273 miles per hour before leaping into the air, tail end up, and pointing the nose directly down at the ground.

Fifteen seconds now, 279 miles an hour, and I'm losing the battle. The broom veered off to the right and straight at the crowd of spectators, families with children holding those bloody cameras, but I still wasn't panicking. I was still fighting...but losing.

After fifteen-and-a-half seconds, I decelerated to 232 miles per hour, and experienced my last memory of that day. As I veered off to the right, all my efforts to save the situation were in vain and I knew I was going to crash. I remembered my reverse thrust technique used for slowing down before landing and threw my weight into turning the broom.

But I still headed for the crowd, though.

I had two choices: I could try to slow down and save myself or I could turn back around and try to avoid them somehow. I turned the broom back and found myself forced into an involuntary roll. I registered that I was entirely upside down now and had to avoid hitting the crowd while disorientated about which way is up.

I tried to find the blue of the sky, and once I did, I pushed the nose of the broom towards it. I could hear screams and a see a blur of colour passing beneath me. I missed them, and then saw that I was heading for the trees.

The next thing to happen, I was quietly convinced, is that I die.

I wasn't scared. My life did not flash before my eyes. There was just a calm resignation, and also a strange relief at finally knowing the answer to a question that perhaps haunts many of us in the background of our thoughts: 'How will I die'. Well, at precisely half past five, on Saturday, 24th September, 2011, I believed I knew exactly how and when my life would end and I passed out as the G-forces generated by the force of the crash exceeded those of which I could maintain consciousness.

It was just over sixteen seconds.

So here we find ourselves at the part of the story I don't remember. My wife Hermione will have to take over the narration.

* * *

It was at about half past five on Saturday afternoon when I got off the phone to my mother, after having her talk me through the preparation of yet another family meal I didn't have a clue on how to make from scratch, when I heard the fireplace blaze and a clumsy body bumping into one of the dining room chairs.

I was about to laugh at my husband's lack of grace on the ground and ask why he was back earlier than expected, when I heard Harry's voice through heavy panting breaths.

"Hermione, it's Ron. He's had an accident. You've got to come with me."

"Oh, God, no." I heard the tremor in my voice as the words I'd had nightmares about hit me at the one time in my life I hadn't expected them.

My head was full of so many different thoughts and feelings that it felt as if I was being shouted at from all sides and sinking into a huge, dark cloud. For all my thirty-two years on this planet, I'd only spent eleven without Ron and they were the loneliest and emptiest years of my life and I didn't want to have to be without him again.

I was shaking all over and my insides were crushing in on themselves. There was something I always felt looming over our lives together and that was the constant threat that Ron could be taken away from me. I'd already had to go on without him once, for a short time, but it was dreadful and that was when I knew he was physically fine.

I had been sitting and talking with Andromeda Tonks about how amazing she was to be raising her grandson all by herself and she said something to me that chilled me to the bone. She told me that from the moment her daughter had become an Auror, it had felt like a countdown had started, seconds ticking away until her time was up. Tonks had an hourglass full of luck and one by one, day by day, the grains of sand grew fewer.

One day, it would only take one day for Ron to be unlucky, and what if that day was today?

I reached for the phone and pressed redial.

"No, no, please God, no."

I already had tears streaming down my face.

"Look, it's ok," Harry said as he watched me clutching the phone to my ear with my shaking hand. "He's moving his arms and legs. They're taking him to hospital. I'll go with you."

I let out a despairing cry.

"No, it's _not_ ok, Harry!" I snapped. "For Heaven's sake, he's got two little ones!"

With tears blurring my vision, I lifted the hem of my top to wipe my face, all the while listening to the ringing sound on the earpiece of the telephone. When Mum eventually picked up, her first thought was for her grandchildren.

"We'll come and stay with the kids. I'll use that Portkey thingy you left with us for emergencies."

After hanging up, I burst into tears again, screamed, yelled, wiped my face and threw myself into Harry's chest.

"Let me know what I can do," Harry whispered into my hair.

I could feel him shaking and knew that he must be in a terrible state, too, but I couldn't prioritise anything over my need to get to Ron at that moment. I waited for my parents to arrive so they could sit with Rosie and Hugo, trying not to look at Harry in his mud-spattered, grass-stained clothes.

When they did arrive moments later, my father spoke to me so calmly, so gently, and with such love, that another flood of tears exploded from me. Mum followed me to the bedroom, where I threw a case onto the bed.

"I don't know what's happened and I don't know when I'll be back. Oh, God."

More tears flowed as I threw ridiculous things into a suitcase. Mum watched me with tears running down her own cheeks. I had no idea what I was doing or what I should pack. The main thing was a dressing gown; in hospital you always need a dressing gown. The thing took up almost the entire suitcase.

Still, I didn't take it out. It was him, it was comfortable, and he'd like it.

Rose and Hugo were playing together in the living room.

"Rosie, Hugo," I called, trying not to sound upset. "Daddy's gone and broken his fancy broomstick."

"Oh, not again!" Rosie said, rolling her eyes.

"Yes, I'm afraid so, and he's got his clothes dirty so I'm going to have to take him some new ones."

"Oh, ok," said Hugo, brightly. "He's silly."

"Yes, darling, he is."

We hugged. Hugo was easy; he was just three. But after he'd skipped off to the kitchen, Rosie looked at me -– _really_ looked at me. Her eyes filled with tears and so did mine. I knelt down, cupped her tiny shoulders in my hands and looked her straight in the eyes.

"It'll be ok, Rose, it will. I love you. Come on."

She nodded and threw her arms around me.

"I love you, Mummy."

I gave that little girl such a hug. She knew something terrible had happened and it had happened to her daddy. Her wonderful, wonderful daddy.

I let Harry guide me to the Floo and I remember taking a couple of deep breaths before taking my handful of Floo powder and stepping into the grate. As I stepped out of the Floo at the St Mungo's end, the first face I saw was Ginny's.

Ginny was one of the only people who could understand what I was going through. Not only did she have a husband who was always in and out of mortal peril, but she and Ron had a very close brother and sister relationship. Before Harry and I had come along, they had been one another's best friend.

"Mum's got the kids," she said blankly.

Harry came through behind me and grabbed each of us by the hand, dragging us along behind him. Ginny set about her husband with demands for the full story of what happened. She wanted details, times, intricate descriptions. It reminded me of her reaction to Ron's poisoning on his seventeenth birthday; there was something about knowing everything about a bad situation that made Ginny able to handle it.

All I kept thinking about was how many times Ron had been hospitalised since I'd known him. One time - it would only take just one day where he wasn't as lucky as usual, and I would lose him.

I scolded myself for thinking like that. He was the toughest man in the world. He always recovered because he was made from stronger stuff than normal people. I'd get to his room to find him sitting up in his hospital bed with a few bumps and bruises, wearing a sheepish grin on his face, and a string of apologies on his lips.

'_I'm sorry. I broke stuff.'_

And I'd give him a hug and a kiss and we'd carry on as usual. It was then that we turned a corner and the reporters from the _Prophet_ appeared, all fighting each other for the scoop, and photographers elbowing each other out of the way for the photo of Harry Potter with the distraught wife of best friend, Ron Weasley.

"Healers say his condition is critical. How bad is it Harry?" one of the hacks called out.

Critical? _Critical?_

Harry hadn't used that word to me. I couldn't read his expression because he was pulling me and Ginny through the tabloid vultures blocking our way. The images in my head were making me feel sick. I became lost in my own internal mantra.

_Please be alive. Please God, Merlin and whoever else was listening, I beg you, please keep him alive for me._

People called out my name, asked me questions. I thought maybe I glimpsed Neville out of the corner of my eye. I didn't respond to anybody.

"Hello, Mrs Weasley?"

I stopped behind Harry, head down and waiting for Molly to answer whoever was speaking to her, not used to being called Mrs Weasley, what with there being so many of us.

Ginny rubbed my back, knowing that I didn't realise I was being spoken to, and I looked up to see a kindly-looking blonde man, around the same age as Bill and Charlie, smiling at me.

"Yes, I'm Mrs. Weasley. Can you tell me how he is?"

"Your husband's suffered a serious blow to the head and he's sustained a serious brain injury." He paused and lowered his head to look into my face with concern. "You okay?"

Serious brain injury – three words that echo through your soul.

An injury to the brain, not the head, but the brain and serious. Heads can be mended with magic -- bones, skin, severed body parts, sometimes -- but brains are too complex even for Healers to deal with using nothing but spells and potions.

My husband, my Ron, broken? It just couldn't be true. My amazing, funny, brave, beautiful, lovely, adorable husband was in here somewhere. But maybe it wasn't him anymore. Maybe it would never be him again.

But we'd cope, it'd be fine. Whatever happened, we'd get through it.

I wiped my face and took a few huge gulps of air as the blonde man led us down the corridors, corridors that never seemed to end, corridors that appeared to turn eight right corners and still never get anywhere.

Finally, we turned another right hand corner and I recognised the nervous-looking Andy Womble, chewing on his thumbnail in the middle of an empty corridor, and he saw me and froze. He was usually in charge of events and stunts and the like, but he hadn't been there for this one. He had found out about the accident and dropped everything to come to the hospital. He looked painfully guilty when he saw me.

He walked very fast towards me and I gave him a half smile as he hugged me.

"What a day, eh?" I said to him.

He was relieved. He genuinely thought I was going to hit him. But all I cared about was getting to Ron.

Nobody was allowed to continue but me. I followed the kind, blonde man through some double doors. The lights were dimmed inside, and there was a Mediwitch smiling at me. The blonde Healer quietly disappeared, and the Mediwitch said something while we walked. A curtain was drawn around a bed on my right.

"Is that him?"

"No."

We kept walking through more doors into a special ward for high-risk patients, past closed curtains, and in the last bed was Ron. A shroud of spells swirling around his chest and head ever so slightly obscured him from view. There were spells for breathing, and a magical pump pushing air into his lungs via a thin tube which had been enchanted like a snake to wriggle down into his bruised chest to help him. There was a spell to give him water and one to banish urine.

His face was yellowed from the bruises that had been magically healed already. He had a bizarre lump the size of my fist on his forehead; apparently, his crash helmet had struck a tree trunk so hard it had caved one part of the helmet in. If he hadn't worn such a good one, who knows how much worse it could have been.

His left eyelid was four times its normal size and deep crimson. The medi-witch was explaining something about not being able to treat the eye while the brain was still swelling. I didn't pay attention. I simply stared at him.

He was still, with not a flicker of life. The only movement came from the magical pump as it squeezed the air out and into Ron's lungs and then inflated again. I kissed his cheek.

"Hello, my darling."

The tears were dripping off my chin as I spoke, but I was half smiling. Desperate as you might imagine it to be, I knew he was there. I knew with every ounce of my being he was there. Buried, tired, exhausted, but the spirit of this man who was as tough as any heroic warrior in a boy's storybook was dormant...not dead.

I'd just have to wait for him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Reparo **

**Part 3**

There was a medi-witch sitting at the foot of Ron's bed with a floating mass of tests results before her. Against the wall, she was brewing three potions at once. She recorded every little movement and change in his condition regularly and plotted charts, altering the lines to fit in with the new readings, and judging when to administer new treatments.

But mostly, she just sat at the end of his bed, watching him.

There she was, like a guardian angel, a wonderful woman with short, strawberry-blonde hair and a kind face. I instantly felt reassured by her presence; I trusted her. I let my eyes scan Ron's face, his left eye looked really dreadful and it seemed to swell even more by the moment. There was a lot of dried blood around his nostrils, mixed with bits of earth. Apparently, when he damaged the crash helmet, the visor had flipped up and the helmet had been filled with soil and stones, which was how his eye had been so badly damaged. George was the first at the scene and he'd saved Ron from suffocating by clearing his nose and mouth of lumps of dirt.

It was as if somebody had used my husband's beautiful face as a plough.

I sat there holding his hand -- a hand you could squeeze, stroke, manipulate, but which gave no movement in return. There but not there, so bizarre and so unreal, and so awful.

Every half an hour, the medi-witch would carry out observations, asking Ron to do various things. Opening his eyes was the first task, then saying his name. She would place her fingers into each of his hands and ask him to squeeze them or wriggle his toes for her. He did nothing.

She'd be talking sternly and loudly at him, still nothing. Then, 'I'm going to have to cause you a little pain Ronald.'

"Ron," I corrected. "Please, call him Ron. He doesn't like it when you call him Ronald -- he thinks he's in trouble."

She smiled and nodded before explaining to me that she had to get some kind of response from him and to do this, she would press her knuckle into a pressure point between his eyebrows and his nose, pushing and twisting the bony knuckle into it. It clearly hurt him but his response wasn't great.

He managed a flick of his eyelids, nothing else. The medi-witch would lift his eyelids and shine the tip of her illuminated wand into his eyes to check his responses. He didn't flinch. He didn't speak. When she tried to get him to squeeze her fingers, there was nothing.

It wasn't encouraging.

The reality of a life with somebody who didn't recover from this stage was frightening. I wouldn't allow myself to think about it. I had no doubt that this was simply the beginning of a recovery for Ron. I knew him, he kicked and he fought. If anyone could heave himself through this, it was my Ron and I'd be there when he made it back.

After the crash, when George had cleared Ron's airway, the Emergency Healers descended upon him and got to work assessing his condition. Ron had regained consciousness and, according to those at the scene, his eyes were pointing in opposite directions. He ignored everything the Healers said but when he heard a familiar voice, first George's and then Harry's, he obeyed.

They worked out that the only way he'd cooperate was if a member of his family repeated whatever instruction the Healers gave. A head injury is strangely predictable, or so I've since read. The impact isn't felt immediately which is why, once the helmet had been removed, Ron had made protests that he needed to go and reassure the crowd that everything was all right. He became steadily more aggressive on his way to the hospital as his brain swelled. At St Mungo's, the Healer in charge of emergency admissions put him into an enchanted sleep to prevent him from damaging his brain further.

The enchantment was soon lifted, but by then, the effects of the brain injury had taken over. Ron had haemorrhaging, his brain was bruised and there was some bleeding, the huge fist-sized lump on his forehead was due to fluid draining from his injury.

He'd suffered the most damage to the right frontal lobe. This is the part of the brain that deals with recognition, the ability to judge distances, decision making, problem solving, and personality.

We were told that he might never be the person he was before the crash. Some people no longer recognise their loved ones or decide to change their whole way of life after such injuries and simply abandon their family. The future was, at the very best, uncertain.

Ron's oldest brother, Bill, arrived at about half-past one in the morning. He'd been away, working for Gringotts bank in Cairo, for the past month. His free time was as rare as Ron's. Ron used to joke about his very grown up job in banking and take the Mickey out of him, occasionally sending him X-rated Howlers in the middle of the day so that they would go off during important meetings.

Suddenly, there was no laughter, no fun, just fear.

At about half-past four that same morning, one of Ron's other brothers, Percy, arrived with his wife, Audrey. Percy was Minister for Education and Audrey was a nursery school teacher. They had left their two girls, Molly and Lucy, with Audrey's sister and been caught up in hospital red tape trying to find out where Ron was for hours. The irony of Percy being hampered by bureaucracy wasn't lost on him.

The longer it took family members to get to Ron, the worse it had been. They spent an hour with him before tiredness overcame them and they left to get a room at the Leaky Cauldron for the night. Poor Molly and Arthur were still back at The Burrow, taking care of Harry and Ginny's children, as well as George's boy and girl.

During the night, Kingsley Shacklebolt had arrived at the hospital and made it his business to take care of all the waiting friends and family outside. He cast an engorgement charm on a linen cupboard until it was big enough to be a private waiting room and set up large, squishy sofas for everybody to sprawl upon and get some sleep.

I remember vividly the first time the medi-witch caused Ron some pain and he reacted; it was terrifying. His eyes rolled as he tried to open them, arms flailing wildly and grabbing anything the came into contact with. He clawed at the sheets before lashing out at a bottle of potion set beside him. All the while, he could barely lift his head from the pillow. The tough, scrappy Ron Weasley was in there, ready to fight his corner.

After he settled down, I took hold of his hand and willed my husband to stay alive.

As the hours went on, his odds improved slightly. He actually managed to lift one of the fingers on his right hand; it was brilliant! It was such a breakthrough and the relief was overwhelming. I remember thinking 'Something worked. If one thing works then so will another.'

I was elated. The next few observational tests all showed signs of improvement, as if he was on his way back, but then, at about five in the morning, he started to dip badly. He just wasn't interested. He wasn't trying. I looked at the medi-witch.

"Bad, isn't it?"

"It's not good," she admitted.

She tried causing him pain, but on this occasion it hadn't worked, and for the first time, I really felt that I was going to lose him.

"Ron? Ron!" the medi-witch shouted at him.

"Can I shout at him?" I asked. "The way I do when he's had too much to drink?"

"Try anything, love." The way she spoke confirmed she was as worried as I was.

She had her index fingers inside his limp hands but nothing was happening, nothing. I took a deep breath, moved close to his face, and yelled.

"_Ron, you squeeze those fingers, squeeze those bloody fingers, it's important!"_

The tears were running down my face. Both the medi-witch and I were hunched over him, and as I finished yelling, he made a very tiny movement with his fingers, both little fingers.

Oh, the relief was so great I half thought I'd pass out.

Ron has confided since that he remembers that he was tired and there was a nice, easy route and he could just drift away there, relax, checkout. That was what he'd decided to do, checkout. He remembers being jolted back, his mind suddenly, somehow recognising that he was in trouble. He'd realised he'd upset me and he ought to stop playing the game now. He had to pull himself back to face the music. It was, I now believe, no coincidence that people refer to recoveries like this as 'pulling through', because that's precisely what Ron did. He pulled himself back.

It was a dark place for him, from his later description, and more akin to hauling yourself flat on the ground with only your fingernails able to offer you any means of moving forwards. Slipping back or remaining still meant death.

I'm so very grateful that he made the effort.

At eight o'clock in the morning, Ron's medi-witch handed over to her replacement, a man called Jim. It was really difficult watching her go and I felt apprehensive about this new medi-wizard. He was an older man with glasses and grey hair who was very forthright and I instantly got the impression he'd stand for no nonsense.

His first observational tests with Ron were the most awful yet. Ron wasn't responding too well so Jim did the 'I'm going to have to cause you pain' line. Within seconds, Ron was thrashing about. He threw himself into a sitting position and Kingsley and George came running over.

Ron grabbed the breathing tube pumping air into his chest with his right hand and started yanking it from his lungs. He was gagging and fighting off his brother and the Minister for Magic as he kept pulling the tube from his throat.

I was on my feet, tears running down my face, crying, "Ron! No, _NO!"_

But his instincts had taken over. There was a tube in him that he wanted out and no one was going to hold him. Jim shouted at Kingsley and George.

"Let him go! He'll hurt himself more if you try to stop him."

They released their hold and Ron gagged like an animal regurgitating food, but each time he retched he yanked another few inches of tube out of his mouth. It was so frightening. I felt as though I was watching my husband commit suicide.

The pipe took forever to finally come free of Ron's mouth. It was about a foot long and once out, he coughed and moaned, then collapsed back on the bed and was out. I asked Jim what would happen without the magical breathing pump.

"We'll have to keep and eye on him and see if he can cope without it."

"Oh, God."

I sat there watching his chest like I never had done before. His breathing was very weak. His chest barely moved. But then, unexpectedly, his right arm started to move. He fumbled around under the covers and his hand found what it was seeking.

I looked at Jim and he was grinning.

"He's a scrabbler, that's what we want to see."

"Scrabbler?"

"It's a thing you see very often with men who've had this kind of injury. They regress, he's a little boy. He's back to basics and he's checking that his most important part is still there."

"It's a good sign then?"

"Oh yeah, it's a good sign."

I smiled at Ron's quiet, still expressionless face, and kissed him on the cheek.

* * *

Ron's observational tests showed that he wasn't improving dramatically but he tried to open his eyes for Jim and make very small movements with his toes as well as his fingers. The left side was weaker but it was responding slightly.

Later than morning, when Ron was brought out of his unconscious state, he decided he didn't approve of the charm to banish urine from his bladder and managed to clumsily lift it with the same wandless magic that very young magical children perform. The shoddy 'infant' magic had done its job but left the area it had been placed very sore.

"Ron, no, stop it." I tried to grab his hand but he pushed me away.

As he did so, I realised that his good eye was ever so slightly open.

"Hello," I said, softly, to him.

He looked straight at me but there was absolutely no recognition whatsoever. It was devastating. Jim told me to go and get myself a coffee while he sorted Ron out.

I walked to the toilets, sat on the loo, and cried.

"Where are you?" I whispered. "Please come back. Please."

* * *

A great deal of positivity began to build as Ron continued to make progress. He'd started to move his limbs unprompted -- admittedly either to grab a certain part of his anatomy or, his favourite pastime, pick his nose -- but it was fantastic progress.

I should mention, in Ron's defence, his nose was, at the time of the accident, completely filled with mud so he could be forgiven for wanting to sort it out.

He hated doing his observational exercises now but Jim was stern with him. Ron managed to move both hands and feet slightly and even mumbled a couple of times. I was stroking his forehead gently when he moved his head towards me and muttered something. I was so surprised, I nearly burst into tears.

"Sorry, darling?"

He repeated himself and I just made out the words 'fuse box.' I knew, instantly, what he was thinking about. Just a few days earlier, something had gone wrong with the electrics in the house and Ron and his father had been shocking themselves repeatedly as they tried to solve the problem by skimming instructions from thirty-year-old Muggle textbooks.

Arthur had been sure it was the fuse in one of the plugs and Ron had thought it was one of the main fuses in the fuse box. While Ron was at work, I'd called in a Muggle electrician to have a look and he solved the problem.

"No, it was the fridge freezer," I said. "It overheated and shorted out the whole house. The trip switch went and that's why we lost all the power."

"Oh, okay," he said and then went back to sleep.

I was grinning like a Cheshire cat, tears rolling down my face. The box of tissues next to me was empty by now, so I had to use my sleeve. It didn't matter, nothing in the world mattered except him. He spoke. He was remembering a piece of life, recalling his world, _our_ world.

I've no idea how the day passed but I recall that it was evening when Jim and the Healer on duty agreed that it would be okay for George and Percy to come in and see him. So far, only one family member at a time would come in and sit with me, and that was for no longer than twenty or thirty minutes.

George had been with Ron since he'd arrived at the hospital and had not gone home since. Despite this, he'd let his other siblings go in ahead of him and kept waiting patiently outside in the makeshift waiting room. Percy's wife had gone home to take her girls off her sister's hands and put them to bed while he had remained to wait for news.

Both had let Harry and Ginny be there for me and Ron, but now they needed to have some time with their brother and for everybody else to persuade me to take a break.

When they arrived, we all instinctively tried to be jolly and George was doing his best to be his usual self. He sat at Ron's bedside, leaned over and spoke in a tender, loving voice.

"The reason this happened to you is because you are a crap flyer. Honestly, I can't believe they let you do this for a living. You're shit at it!"

He was acting normal and the corner of Ron's mouth flickered into a slight smile. George was elated at this.

I was in the waiting room with the rest of the family fussing over me and Andy Womble was trying to arrange some fish and chips to be brought in for everybody. The door flew open and George burst in.

"Hermione quick, he's awake, he's sitting up. Come on!"

We were both running down the corridor with Harry and Andy close behind, and George was visibly moved.

"It was amazing, he just opened his eyes!"

We dashed through the double doors and there, incredibly, sitting on the side of his bed, his hair dishevelled, his face bruised and battered, was my wonderful husband. As I reached the bed, ecstatic but apprehensive, he looked straight at me, a great dopey grin on his face and his good eye half open.

"Hello, love," he said.

He knew me. _He_ _knew me!_ Oh, thank God.

And how I loved to see that look, that cheeky, naughty, loveable look I'd wondered if I'd ever see again. He really resembled someone woken from deep sleep after consuming an awful lot of alcohol and winning a wrestling match with a troll.

"Hello, darling." I was so thrilled to look him in the eye as I said it.

He wanted to have a pee and insisted he should be allowed to stand up to do it. He was offered a bedpan but decided that was an awful idea. He wanted to go properly. I took one elbow and Jim took the other with Ron's Healer following behind ready to catch him should he fall, and we headed towards the loo.

Ron was surprised at his lack of coordination but kept looking at me and grinning.

"Hello!" he'd say, and then a few minutes later. "Hello!"

I thought my face would explode, I was smiling so hard.

"Hello, you," I answered him.

It really was like dealing with a drunk. We had to stay with him at the toilet or he would have fallen over. I remember warning him as he stood there, 'This is going to hurt', remembering that he'd ripped the urine banishment charm away from himself with infantile wandless magic.

"Oh ssssshit!"

His face was an explosion of unexpected pain. He blinked and looked quite shocked. We all shuffled back to his bed, he smiled at everyone, said a couple of words to Harry, said 'Hello, cockface' to Percy, smiled and passed out.

Obviously, the boys owled everybody they'd ever met and I got Kingsley to enable a signal for my mobile phone and rang my parents to tell them the news.

* * *

Jim handed over to a new medi-witch at around eight o'clock the following morning. Ron's condition was a little more stable now and the medi-witch thought it would be a good idea to perform a teeth cleaning charm on him. As soon as she pointed her wand at his mouth, he clenched his teeth and pressed his lips together.

"Shall I try?" I volunteered.

"Yes, of course Mrs Weasley."

She stood back and I drew my own wand.

"Come on, darling, open up."

He parted his lips slightly and I managed to clean between them for a second or two.

"Geddof," he mumbled.

"I'm just cleaning your teeth," I said softly.

He opened his eyes and gave me the most venomous look.

"Bugger. Off."

I smiled at his medi-witch but inside I was heartbroken. He'd looked straight through me. He'd forgotten me again.

When the most important Healers of St Mungo's were called to consult on Ron's condition, with much prompting from Minister Shacklebolt I don't doubt, they decided that he didn't need to be on the high-risk ward anymore and agreed to move him to another room where he could still be observed closely, but with fewer restrictions on visitors.

Ron was asleep when the move began but soon woke up when a quick cleansing charm plucked out several hairs with the overzealousness of its caster.

Eyes closed, Ron snapped.

"Piss off!"

"We need to clean you up to move you, Ron," she explained, softly.

"Fuck. Off."

"Ooh, that's not nice," she said before trying again. There was some dried blood in his pubic hair from his wandless extraction of the charm placed upon him.

"Fuck right off! _Ouch!_"

Ron batted the wand away, briefly opened his good eye, and gave us both an evil glare. We both looked at each other and pulled faces.

"He must be feeling better then," I said to the medi-witch with a smirk.

Ron was still in a foul mood when the medi-witch came to do the next set of observational tests. She had tried to get him to squeeze her finger with a hand he'd just had blood taken from to make a type-specific potion. He'd been grumpy about the cut on his hand and had become slightly punchy at the Healer's attempt to heal it. I'd told them I'd have a go once he'd calmed down a little.

"Ow," he mumbled, his eyes firmly shut.

"Come on, Ron, squeeze my fingers," the medi-witch insisted.

"No," he replied, stubbornly.

"Come on," she coaxed.

"Fuck sake _OW!_" he yelled angrily and yanked the hand with the cut away from her.

"I think that's sore," I said, cringing.

The medi-witch agreed.

"Sorry, Ron, I won't touch it again."

He wasn't interested. He pulled a face: eyes still closed, and rolled over to turn his back towards us. We set about untangling the sheets and bedclothes that had instantly become entwined around him.

I left Ron briefly while the Healers prepared him for the move. It was great to be leaving the room where he'd been under constant surveillance behind. It was as if this was the room Death had reserved and hovered, waiting just over the shoulder of the medi-witch on watch.

It was nice to see Ron all clean and lovely; he had been shifted onto a bed on wheels that had crisp, clean sheets and there was just the cut on his hand which had a temporary dressing on it until I could get him to allow me to heal it for him. He was ready to travel. His pillow was propped up a little and for a couple of minutes, he must have come round.

I know he did because, although I was having a quick cup of tea with Charlie, when I returned, his clean, white sheets were spattered with a deep shade of crimson, as were the pillowcases, his chest, one of the medi-witches and the wall opposite.

He'd decided to see what would happen if he tore off the dressing on the back of his hand, which had ripped off the fragile skin over the cut. I think we all found out why wizards don't usually heal cuts with dressings that day, quite memorably.

We arrived at the new ward, with me looking like a zombie and him as my most recent victim. The Healers were apologising to the staff at the shocking state of their patient. Ron woke up and appeared to be in a state of confusion over the move. He said a couple of things to the new team of medi-witches who worked on his new ward, along the lines of 'I'm sorry, I've made a bit of a mess', and looked at me regularly for reassurance – although I'm not sure if he knew who I was.

I think something told him I was someone to trust. After all, I'd been there constantly, so I suppose he sought comfort in familiarity.

I seemed to spend all my time walking back and forth around the hospital. There were lots of cards and flowers from well-wishers. When I returned, the medi-witches and Healers were all a kafuffle. The matron bustled over to me.

"Just so you know, we've locked this door." She pointed to the door leading to Ron's room. "It's a bit too close to the entrance to the ward and we're a bit worried that someone from the _Prophet_ might try to get in."

She explained that somebody from the hospital security had alerted them and they now had an Auror positioned at the entrance to the ward. Harry looked at me with a 'I'm buggered if I know about this' expression and went out to speak to the Auror on duty immediately.

Ron had become big news and nobody on the outside really knew how he was doing. Kingsley suggested that he escort one of the Healers out to make a statement to the reporters, updating them on Ron's condition, and he was every bit the kindly figure of calm authority.

The truth about Ron's condition was that the staff at St Mungo's were all astounded at the speed of his recovery. Every time he became lucid, they would ask him if he knew where he was or what had happened.

He kind of knew he was in London, and when you asked him where he was, he answered 'hospital' but he had no idea why he was in hospital and I'd explain that he'd had an accident.

"Oooooh, shit," he'd respond calmly, as if he was humouring me, and give me a disbelieving look, but it really didn't appear to register with him.

"You crashed, darling," I whispered.

"Did I?" he lifted his eyebrows and looked vaguely interested. "Was it good?"

"Mmmmm...pretty impressive," I told him.

"Oh, shall we have a cup of tea?" He smiled.

"Yes, let's have a cup of tea. I'll go and get it."

He smiled at me.

"Thank you."

He was too polite. He was talking to me as you would do to somebody you didn't really know. The move had tired him. His expression was becoming very glazed.

When his parents arrived, Ron was making every effort to be the person they both wanted to see. He was smiling, sitting up in bed and making jokes. It was a heart-warming picture for Molly and Arthur. Sadly, it was clear after three minutes or so that his memory of the present was gone. He'd repeat himself again and again.

He'd ask his mum and dad, 'Did you Floo here?' and they'd explain that a Ministry car had come to pick them up and Ron would impress upon me the importance of thanking people for their generosity. He'd take a sip of tea, then, 'So how did you get here?'

It was something I'd become accustomed to and I'd pre-warned everybody who came to visit that it would probably happen. As long as you drove the conversation, Ron would appear to be completely recovered and unaffected by his injury as happened when Professor McGonagall, the retired head of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, came in to visit him.

Ron has absolutely no recollection of the visit but it's one I shall never forget.

When she arrived, Ron was sitting up in bed, grinning, and became so animated as he discussed Quidditch brooms and future demonstrations to be held at the school it was almost embarrassing. I wanted to interrupt and say 'He really is very ill – I know you wouldn't think it but he's got brain damage'.

Ron put on an incredible show and, as I walked Professor McGonagall out of the ward, she even commented on how amazing Ron was. I agreed, though secretly I was very worried about him. When I arrived back at the ward, Ron was much quieter. He suddenly looked exhausted. His parents quickly noticed the signs and made to leave.

Ron fell asleep moments after they left.

It was some time later when I found myself sitting on the edge of Ron's bed, talking with him, and he looked up at me and sighed.

"This is very nice. You're very lovely."

"Thank you," I said with a chuckle.

"But I have to go now," he said, sheepishly. "I really have to go back to my wife."

That was a shocker.

"No darling, _I'm_ your wife."

"No, you're lovely, but my wife's French."

I couldn't help but feel that jealous, teenage girl huffing inside of me with great indignance, as she had done while watching Ron make a complete fool of himself over his brother's Veela fiancée.

"Really, _I_ am your wife."

"But you can't be," he said with such utter sincerity and clarity that it broke my heart. "I'm having too much fun with you. You're too lovely to be someone's wife."

Phew!

"Well, aren't you the lucky one then?" I smiled and kissed him as he grinned like a cheeky schoolboy.


	4. Chapter 4

**Reparo part 4**

The following day was very busy.

With Ron now conscious and talking, understandably, everybody wanted to see him. That was a real problem. Ron was giving everybody who walked into his room an excellent rendition of the Ron he thought they'd like to see. Then he'd falter, repeat himself or become confused, or most often, take the conversation around in circles and he was very tired.

I'd left him momentarily and when I returned I was horrified to find him on his knees, his hands cupped around the back of his head, his face buried into the pillow and rocking back and forth.

"Your head?" I asked him as I ran to his side. "Painful?"

"Yes!" he half whimpered and half screamed into his pillow. "Please help me."

I ran out of his room and straight to the Matron's station. The woman in her dark blue robes, was already moving around her desk to see why I was so distressed and snapped her fingers for another medi-witch to follow her.

"He's in pain, really bad pain," I told them.

The two women ran back to the room with me. It was dreadful. He was in such agony that his face was unrecognisable. I stood back, hands over my face and eyes peering through my fingers, and watched the matron as the medi-witch moistened some Sleeping Nightshade leaves in wine vinegar before laying them on Ron's forehead. The medi-witch held Ron's arms tightly to his sides and the matron watched as Ron began to succumb to the concoction's purpose of inducing sleep.

His breathing became less erratic as he slumped against the medi-witch's body. The matron removed the leaves from his forehead and threw them into a bin with a banishment charm placed upon it. She called to one of her colleagues to bring her a strong dose of pain potion and a jot of sleeping draught.

"Could I hold him while you...?" I offered as I took a step forward.

The medi-witch gave me a smile and a nod as she shifted out from behind Ron's body. I slipped into her place and wrapped my arms around him, holding him close against me, resting my cheek against the top of his head. I was close enough to hear his low moans of discomfort and whispered to him that his head would stop hurting soon.

The matron took the pain potion from the tray one of her staff presented to her and pulled out the stopper with a neat 'pop'. She asked me to tip Ron's head back and I did so as gently as I could.

"I want you to drink and swallow for me, Ron," the matron said, with her no-nonsense tone of voice.

Ron rolled his head to one side and winced. I whispered into the side of his face that I was there and he would feel much better if he just drank the potion. He groaned a little and then let me turn his face back towards the matron. She poured the contents of the small bottle into his mouth and Ron swallowed, coughed a little and then swallowed more comfortably.

I wiped the trickle coming from the corner of his mouth with my sleeve and felt him release a full body sigh as the pain potion begin to take effect.

"Now for some peaceful sleep," Matron said as she nodded to me to support Ron's sagging head while she tipped the small cupful of sleeping draught past his lips.

I felt Ron swallowing and stroked his hair until he was asleep, then the matron helped me lay him down again. I sat down heavily in the chair next to him, watching as his expression slowly changed, and the pain and tension gradually dropped away.

It's strange how exhausting it is to watch somebody you love in such misery. You go through every second with them and you despise every uncomfortable moment, just willing it to be over. When the matron and medi-witch left, I really thought I was going to be sick.

The matron called the Healers to let them know what had happened and they soon confirmed that Ron's condition had deteriorated yet again. They put a silencing charm around his room and ordered peace and quiet for the foreseeable future. From then on, visitors would be strictly monitored. It was suggested that I continue to be with Ron but that only very close family be allowed to continue to visit, and then only for fifteen minute periods.

Ron's determination to give everyone who visited him an enjoyable time had really taken its toll.

* * *

While Ron was sleeping, I took a walk to stretch my legs. I went to fetch myself a cup of tea, took my time in drinking it, and then popped to the loo before heading back to my place at Ron's side.

Oh yes, I was playing the dutiful wife role to a tee. The funny thing was that I wasn't doing anything I thought 'the wife' was supposed to do; I was simply doing what we both needed.

Ron needed me to be there for him and I needed to witness every event, every incident, and every fight. It wasn't so much me fulfilling my wifely obligation, it was more that I had always had, and always will have, a need to control Ron.

I am fully aware that this isn't a trait to boast about but it is the honest truth about me and about our relationship. I always want to steer him onto a path I approve. At school, I tried to get him to feel more pride in his work, take his being a prefect more seriously, believe in himself and his vast number of abilities in the same way I did, and he did every one of those things for me. He just didn't do them to the level I expected of him.

I didn't realise until much later how failing to meet my expectations had affected Ron. As I realised how many of my failings he didn't just forgive but also adored, I found it easier to relax about myself and my need to push him on to better things.

I had such ambition for Ron, as much as I had for myself, but things always change with time. All it takes really is time, marriage and babies before you understand that you don't need to be perfect. You don't even need to try to be perfect.

Have you ever heard yourself talking to somebody else and suddenly 'heard yourself'?

I used to go on at Ginny about how fast she settled down and gave up on her dream career. I told her she was the incredible, talented, unique Ginny Weasley and not 'Mrs Harry Potter.' She had so much potential and what came of it all? A couple of Quidditch trophies and then marriage and children.

I told her she was much more than a baby-making machine and she told me she agreed. She told me she was a mother.

I couldn't believe that I had been so determined to prove myself to be more than your typical witch that I'd actually been calling some of the most admirable and remarkable women I know unimpressive. I had fallen into a trap, a way of thinking, that most men do.

But my Ron has a remarkable mother and an equally remarkable sister and all he ever did was be impressed by strong and powerful women. He liked me when I wasn't any fun and I never relaxed; he liked me when I was bossy and condescending and when I put him down without realising it.

He would bicker with me, have verbal duels, it was like a sparring match of two incredible wills, and yet he loved to be challenged. One thing we would always agree on was that his mother was a force to be reckoned with and that his sister wasn't to be underestimated. He loves strong women and can't even converse with those who have no independent spirit or individual aspirations.

We once met a couple at Neville and Hannah's big opening in Hogsmede, a husband and wife who looked pristinely glamorous and made every other couple look like drab wallflowers in comparison, and Ron couldn't believe they were for real. Not because of how perfect they appeared, but because whenever he asked the wife a question about herself, whether it was about what she liked, what she thought, what her opinion was on the topics of discussion we covered in the few minutes we talked, she would turn to her husband and wait for him to answer for her.

Ron kept looking from the woman to me in a state of utter confusion. When the couple moved on he pulled me into a corner and whispered a devastated diatribe at me for not telling him there was something wrong with the woman before he started talking to her like a normal person.

"She is a normal person, Ron. There's nothing wrong with her."

"Were you not standing next to me just then? I asked her if she was enjoying herself and she had to look to her husband to find out if she was or not!"

I looked at him fondly and pulled his face down to meet mine.

"That is what some people think a perfect wife is, darling."

Ron looked stunned.

"You're joking, right?"

I shook my head.

"But she's like...She doesn't even...There are House-elves who have better relationships with their masters than that!"

And there it was. I was trying to show the world what a witch should be and I thought Ginny was letting the side down by settling down. I loved my job and I did a great job and as soon as the children both go to school, I will go back to work. I miss it so very much and I love how what I do there makes a difference but I now understand that what I do at home makes a difference, too.

What Molly Weasley did with her life made a difference because she raised six boys who can't understand the concept of a trophy wife, of any woman being seen but not heard, and one daughter who could make me see that a woman didn't have to choose between being a remarkable woman and being a mother.

I didn't just give up on my own life to have Ron Weasley's babies.

But right now, I would give up everything so my babies could have their daddy back the way he was. Just as Ron had never wanted a silent agreeable partner on his arm, I never wanted him to stop fighting with me.

To this day, I thank God that I chose a man with fight in him, a fighter right down to his very core, because as much as it infuriated me when we were teenagers, it gave me hope now we were adults that he wouldn't be leaving me. He wouldn't be on my arm and looking at me to speak for him. He wouldn't be one of those people who suffer such an injury and leave their family. He wouldn't be anything but my Ron, who showed me that I could be so much more than just a wife, just a mother, just a shining example to career-minded witches everywhere.

I could be all those things.

If Ron could convince me there was nothing I couldn't do then I knew the same applied to him. I also knew that if I wanted Rosie to grow up to be a well-rounded woman with as many options open to her as possible, then she would need the open mind of her daddy as well as the cluttered mind of her overcompensating mother.

I like to tell women I speak to that I'm not much of a feminist...but my husband is teaching me how to be a great one.

* * *

One of my loveliest memories of my time alone with Ron was the overwhelming feeling of happiness that he'd come back. He was child-like and forgetful and difficult, but he was undeniably Ron, and I think I probably loved him more then than I'd ever imagined possible.

A part of me knew he could have been lost forever, yet he'd returned. The pain in his head was still very intense and he was taking pain potions regularly. As Ron was so very exhausted and in so much pain the medi-witches were quick to tell me he'd be asleep all night. They were desperate for me to get some proper rest and, to be honest, I was really starting to feel awful.

So, at about half-past nine in the evening I left Ron and Flooed to the Leaky Cauldron to find a room. The whole family was staying there and Harry had mentioned he'd paid for a bed to be kept free for me.

I slept, briefly and erratically, and by half-past six the following morning, I was dressed and ready to go. I was about to step into the Floo when the head of one of Ron's Healer's appeared there.

"Oh good, it's you," the man sighed with relief. "Ron woke up a short while ago and became very distressed because he didn't know where you were."

"I'm on my way," I said, almost kicking the man's face back into the flames so I could use the fireplace.

Molly had been about to try to persuade me to sit down with her and eat before going to St Mungo's but as I turned to say goodbye to her, I saw the look in her eyes that said she understood I had to go and that she wanted me to do anything I could to make her poor boy feel better.

We shared a smile and a nod and I went on my way.

I know, as a mother, that one day Hugo won't be calling out for me when he's upset. I can't imagine the wrench that must be. I'm so lucky to have a mother-in-law who doesn't try to remain the first name called out in a crisis, who doesn't elbow me out of the way and take over, and I can only hope to be half the person she is as time goes on.

I was now Ron's constant, his anchor, and I would never sleep at the Leaky Cauldron again. I would never leave him alone again. To make him suffer any more than he was already suffering was unforgivable. How could I put him through that?

When I opened the door to his room, he beamed at me.

"Oh, hello," he said, almost timidly, afraid he was going to scare me away. "I'm so glad you're back."

We shared an enormous hug. It lasted longer than any other embrace I've ever known. I wondered, with everything being so mixed up and confusing for him, whether Ron really believed I'd return. Post-traumatic amnesia is an alarming condition. The majority of the time, he had a five second memory. He could remember scraps of past history but just very little since the crash, and what he couldn't be sure of was whether I really existed or was simply a figment of his imagination.

It's difficult to explain how our relationship emerged and how frightening the process was. It felt as though we were piecing together bits of confused emotional memories. Ron was stumbling through feelings and emotions and all the while trying to understand how they related to us.

He'd accepted that I was his wife, I think, and I regularly held his face in my hands and told him, 'If you have any questions, any worries, ask me. I'll tell you the truth.'

* * *

I'd asked Ginny to bring the children to St Mungo's.

I gave them huge cuddles and then sat them down on chairs facing me and crouched down before them, taking one of their tiny hands in each of mine.

"Now, you know where you are don't you?"

Rosie took her thumb out of her mouth just long enough to say, "Yes, we're in a hospital."

Hugo just nodded, looking unusually serious for such a chirpy little boy.

"Remember when I had to rush off because I needed to bring Daddy some new clothes?"

"Yes, because he broke his ones and they were all dirty," Hugo replied, very seriously.

"That's right, love." I smiled. "Well, when he tore his clothes, he also banged his head a bit."

Rosie pulled a face.

"Was there blood?" she asked.

"Just a little bit, just where he banged his eye."

"Ooh, has he got a plaster?" Hugo asked, excitedly.

He had grazed his knee while at my parents' house one afternoon and they did what all Muggle grandparents do and cleaned it up and put a sticking plaster over it. My mum had ones with pictures of Mr Bump from the Mr Men on them and Hugo now insisted on having a plaster even if he'd been magically healed.

"Sort of," I shrugged. "It's more like a bandage."

"Wow, that's really good!" He was impressed, like all three-year-old boys, I suppose.

I looked again at Rosie. Her thumb was planted firmly in her mouth and her face was as serious as she could muster.

"Here's the thing," I said as I squeezed her hand, "because Daddy doesn't really feel very well, he's really tired and really...well...a bit, not like Daddy, but he'll get better. He just needs to get lots and lots of sleep and then he'll be fine."

"He probably needs a nap. He can have my dummy if he wants." Dear Hugo was so like Ron, so like the little boy Molly told me about. "I'll give him a big cuddle!"

"You do that. That'll make him feel much better."

We'd explained to Ron that he should keep a bandage over his eye, as it looked quite gory and might scare the children, and he was overjoyed when he saw them. He forgot completely why he was wearing the bandage and tore it off. Thank heavens I'd prepared the children!

"Ooh, Daddy, that looks sore," Hugo commented.

Rosie was very quiet. She spoke very intensely with Ron about the card she'd made him but he was over-excited. He got up from the bed and I dashed to grab him so he didn't fall. He pulled away from me.

"I'm fine, I'm fine."

He was going to the loo. He hadn't managed to go unaided before this but I understood that, in front of the children, he'd hate me to go with him. My mouth became dry as he shuffled into the bathroom. Before he was halfway through, he fell forward and saved himself by grabbing the chain hanging from the cistern with one hand and the toilet roll holder with the other. There were special spells set up to detect if a patient fell or lost their balance and the high-pitched chirruping sound alerted the medi-wizard on duty and the two of us ran to the toilet to help him.

We helped him back to the bed where he sat, grinning sheepishly. Rosie tried to talk to him about home and the game she'd been playing but he wasn't able to concentrate. He was nodding but his eyes were heavy. The fall had exhausted him.

"Time to say goodbye," I whispered to them.

Hugo gave Ron a kiss.

"Bye, bye Daddy."

Rosie's eyes started to fill. I looked at her with an encouraging smile and mouthed, 'Say goodbye.'

"Bye, Daddy," her voice was breaking but Ron was half-asleep and didn't notice.

"Bye bye, Rosie-posey," Ron said, groggily.

His eyes shut and I took Hugo's hand and lifted Rosie onto my hip. We walked out as quickly as we could to a waiting Ginny. She picked up Hugo as Rosie exploded into uncontrollable sobs and I hugged her to me, heading for the exit.

* * *

"What are we having for lunch?"

I'd grown used to Ron's strange questions so I simply told him we'd had lunch and dinner and now it was bedtime.

"Really? Oh, okay."

He was very sleepy and by the time I'd returned to the room, after I'd finished brushing my teeth, he was fast asleep. It was about nine o'clock in the evening and after _Nox-_ing off the light, I climbed onto my mattress bed on the floor and was soon asleep.

Whenever Ron woke, he would ask the same questions every five minutes.

"Where are the children?"

He had no memory of them leaving.

"Where do we go tomorrow?"

He was convinced we were at the Leaky Cauldron or in a room at the Three Broomsticks.

"When are we meeting up with the others?"

He thought there was some kind of party going on, which was understandable as it was pretty unusual for his entire family to be present at the same time unless it was a special occasion.

Other questions which quickly followed, "Where are my clothes? I've got to get dressed. What time do we need to get to the restaurant?" and I'd explained several times that this wasn't a hotel, there was no party, he couldn't get dressed because he only had pyjamas to wear, and no one was meeting us at a restaurant.

Eventually, he would accept what I'd told him, only to become animated again a few moments later.

"Where's George? Where's Charlie? Where's Mum and Dad? Where's Harry and Ginny? Where's Womble? I need to speak to him about work! _Kingsley_, my boss, when am I due in? When's my post getting here? How did you get here?"

The problem was, no sooner had you answered one question, you would find it followed by another, then seconds later the first question would be asked again. It was quite tiring and sometimes very difficult.

I spoke with him about why he was there.

"Do you know why you're here?"

"No, not really."

"You had a crash, darling."

"You keep saying that."

"You still don't believe me, do you?"

"No, not really."

"Do you remember the Rocket Broom?"

"_Shit!_ I didn't crash that did I? Oh Merlin, I bet they're cross. Did I break it?"

He was half-joking but there was also a faint tone of belief in his voice that I'd never heard before. I knew I had to fish a little more out of him but it was a scary moment. Should I tell him, yet again, my version of what happened?

No, he'd heard it before so why should it work now?

Then it came to me, the _Prophet_, more specifically Harry's statement in the previous day's edition. Ron would believe that; it was written by Dennis Creevey and there was a picture of the Rocket Broom and him, taken with one of those cameras the children were all using that day.

I retrieved the newspaper and he sat, propped up in bed with one knee bent under the covers, and our eyes met.

"Now, are you sure you're ready for this?"

Why was I asking him? He had no idea whether he was ready or not, he had absolutely no idea what had happened, and there he sat, blissfully unaware...maybe this was cruel. Was it better that he didn't know?

No, he trusted me, I promised him I'd only tell him the truth and this was the truth. I knew my eyes were filling with tears as he took the paper from me, his expression had changed, he was taken aback by the front page headline.

'_I Saw Weasley Walk Says Potter'_

"Fuck me, I'm the front page!"

I wasn't sure whether he was trying to make light of it, make me smile, or simply not digesting what he read. When he opened the paper to the centre page spread, his eyebrows lifted. There was a picture of the shattered broom and a huge picture of him weeks before walking the dog. Before he read any further, he looked up at me, panic stricken.

"Jeremy Beagle, shit, where's Jeremy Beagle?"

"It's okay, he's at home. You sat on the doorstep with him the night before."

"Oh, thank God. So he's okay?" Ron sighed deeply.

"Yeah, he's fine."

"Who's looking after him and Crookshanks, the Puff and the owls?"

"Mum. My Mum's at the house with the children."

"Oh yeah, with the kids," he smiled. "I love my kids. When can we go home? Can't we just go?"

His attention had been broken.

"No darling, you're in hospital and you have to stay here for a bit."

"No, I can't," he shook his head adamantly. "We've got to get ready. What time do we need to be at the restaurant?"

"We're not going to a restaurant, we're eating here," I said wearily.

"But the others'll be waiting." He was getting out of bed.

I jumped up and tried to grab for his arm but he was reaching for his bag, becoming quite determined.

"Where's my wand? I really fancy a Chocolate Frog and a Butterbeer. Let's just go to the Leaky and have a Butterbeer and eat chocolate. Someone must have chocolate, c'mon, let's go to the bar."

Oh bugger, he was heading unsteadily for the door.

"Ron, it's just a hospital corridor out there." I spoke as gently and calmly as I could.

"No, there isn't. This is a hotel. Let's nip out and ask George for a drink, or Harry. Who's next door?"

He opened the door and stopped dead in his tracks, his conviction of what lay beyond it lost in an instant. He looked, recoiled, and retreated back in an instant. A glimpse through the door had revealed instantly the bustle of the ward. I caught him, steadied him, and helped him to sit awkwardly back on the side of the bed.

It was so cruel.

I knelt in front of him as he sat and stared at the door. Quietly, he spoke.

"Shit."

I held his hands and kissed them.

"I'm sorry," I said, feeling choked. "I'm so sorry. It really is a hospital, you see?"

He nodded, but looked so very upset. I stood and hugged him, not the way you'd normally hug your husband, not a romantic embrace. I held his head to my heart and kissed it through his copper hair, wiping the tears so he wouldn't feel them drop, feeling so hopelessly, desperately sorry for him and so very sad. He was lost and I didn't know how to help him find his way back.

We had some wonderful chats that night. Several times, Ron asked me where Jeremy Beagle was, which I found really encouraging, clearly somewhere in his mind he'd connected with a piece of new memory.

He didn't want me to sleep on the floor anymore. He wanted me to lie with him. It was so wonderful to be us. I'd been so frightened. There have been so many people who have been through a similar experience, who sat by and watched as the person they love clawed their way back from a life teetering on the brink of extinction. You watch and hope for the sparks of recognition, a flash of memory to bring the pieces back together, so that what used to be can be rekindled.

There's no guarantee, no recipe for success, just a passionate hope.

We were lucky. We were strong before the accident, and in that amazing place in London, that tiny room with boxes of cards and gifts strewn all around us, pictures of brooms drawn by children wishing 'Mr Wheezes' better, we fell in love all over again.

My Ron remembered me, remembered our love, and came back running.

We held each other all night, like our first time together; it was the start of the rest of our lives. He loved me without explanation, without doubt. Thankfully, and I am forever grateful, he'd fallen in love with me again – stronger, deeper, fuller. I knew then, whatever the future held, it embraced us together.

We were one again.


	5. Chapter 5

**Reparo part 5**

Ron's Chief Healer was delighted with his progress and suggested he be moved to a rehabilitation clinic closer to where we lived. We were thrilled on hearing this news but Ron's elation was soon clouded.

"You're coming, too." There was a slight panic in his voice as he looked at me. "You won't leave me, will you?"

I knew straight away he wasn't referring to the journey. Ron had moments of great clarity and I believe he'd realised how unravelled he'd become. Considering how I saw him as the bravest man I ever knew, it was shocking to see him so genuinely scared. Harry saw this side of him more than I ever did; he knew this side of Ron so much better and could always make him feel better. I knew that Ron could be self-destructive when he became too introspective.

Right now, Ron couldn't tell his introspective thoughts from the ones he'd usually share with me. There were the thoughts that wouldn't break my heart or make me worry, like the ones I know a truly hateful man planted deep within my husband and slowly nurtured over time, and the thoughts he'd usually voice.

When in his right mind, the only person who could really destroy the indominatable spirit of Ron Weasley was himself. Only Ron knows how to deliver such crushing psychological blows and it seems that at those times, when Ron stops defending himself against himself, it's only Harry who can stop him.

Right now, Harry was one of the people Ron was putting on a show for. Right now, Harry couldn't reason with his best mate in the world. Right now, Ron had no reason, he couldn't make sense of anything, and all he knew was that when I told him things, they were always true. When I saw his head was hurting, I got somebody to make it stop. When I was there beside him in the mornings, he knew my name, my face and felt safe.

I smiled at him, hugged him to me for a long while, feeling him relax into my shoulder with his head bent into the crook of my neck. I felt so badly for him that he needed to ask me if I was going to leave him.

"Never," I whispered.

He squeezed me tight.

* * *

The evening before we were due to leave for the clinic, Ron had been fretting about work. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, a towel around his waist, having just returned from a shower.

"Can you get me to a fireplace? I need to call Womble."

I have to admit I was exhausted. This exchange had been repeated on and off all day and I'd taken three showers already, knowing that Ron would leave the subject and move on while I was in the bathroom.

"It's okay, Womble's fine."

"Kingsley hasn't been in for a while, has he? I really should talk to Kingsley about all this leave I'm taking."

"It's not leave, darling, it was an accident at work."

"And I need to get in touch with _The Quibbler_."

"I've spoken to Luna, everything's okay. She knows you'll give her an exclusive and she said to take your time and only think about it when you're better."

I don't know if it was the tone of my voice but suddenly, for the first time, Ron's face turned to anger.

"Look, I know you think you know what you're doing but this is _my_ career, _my_ life, so stop speaking to me like I'm an idiot!"

I was so surprised, so overjoyed I started to cry. Perspective had suddenly arrived. He remembered a previous conversation. He'd _remembered!_

"Oh, Ron, Ron, I'm sorry, of course it's your career."

He still looked angry.

"Stop talking to me like that," he snapped.

He was so different; it was fantastic but at the same time quite shocking.

"I don't mean to talk down to you, honestly I don't, but darling, this is the first time you've remembered a conversation. You do remember us talking about this before?"

He looked at me like I was mad.

"Yeah, 'course I do. Look just...just..." he paused, memory gone again but his anger still present. "Just get on with what you're supposed to be doing."

"Okay, sorry."

I rushed into the bathroom to take another shower. I was trembling, exhilarated and nervous all at once. If his memory had returned, perhaps his anger would remain. Tentatively, I pushed open the door. He was in bed, gazing vacantly at the nearby wireless. He shot me a loving smile.

"Hello, you were a long time. Have you shrunk?"

I beamed back at him and inside felt a huge sense of relief. His memory was working its way back and, though still muddled, he had taken another huge step.

Ron was very tired after his arrival at the clinic, which made him argumentative and, considering how I was also tired, it wasn't the easiest transition. The Healer who was to take over Ron's care immediately recognised textbook characteristics in him.

Ron was desperately trying to demonstrate how well he had recovered and yet, ask him what town he was in and there was instant confusion. What had he eaten for lunch? Again - no recall. A deep sadness overcame him whenever we discussed his mental state.

The Healers compared his state of mind to that of a desk cluttered with rolls of parchment that had been swept clean by a strong gust of wind. The rolls scattered all over the place with some rolling into hard to reach places, some travelling into places unseen and needed to be searched for with random desperation. We were trying to help Ron reorganise the desk.

It was a slow and difficult task. It was frustrating and Ron would become difficult, but patience was the key. He needed patience and rest. Ron's brain was exhausted and the best therapy was sleep. The most dangerous factor was work. If he overtaxed his brain too soon, he would suffer a relapse.

It would set him back dreadfully and the Healer spared us no punches; it would be hard to pull back.

But this is my Ron we're talking about. You know that he made it back to me because he was able to tell his story to you up until the accident. Now, I think it's time to give you back to Ron so he can tell you his earliest post-crash memories.

* * *

So now I can come back to tell my side of the story again, at least the patches that I can remember from that point onward, and thank Hermione for filling in the vast blank that I lost and will never get back.

I owe my life to the Healers and medi-witches and wizards at St Mungo's but I can remember nothing of being under their care.

Bed was nice, I liked being there, but I'd been in a crash – a bad one. It was easier to believe it, finally, though there was no evidence to support it. I could move, there was no pain, everything worked, but I felt sad. Something was wrong.

I needed to sleep.

So I did.

Distantly, in flashes, I remembered. The Rocket Broom had crashed. I'd been fighting to save it. Something had gone wrong. I could feel the panic rising as I was losing my fight and then something else had gone wrong, something worse, and there had been nothing I could do but die. I hadn't died but I was scared.

I slept again.

I'd hurt my brain, damaged the very place where I lived. It's the most personal attack imaginable. I was reduced to thoughts, to patterns and pictures. I felt like a confused Boggart that was in the middle of a Quidditch pitch on a match day.

I'd been in a crash. My body had been hurt but that didn't matter to me now. I wasn't a body, I was something else. I had to fight back.

I needed to sleep.

It was a dark battle and a bitter one. I needed strength.

I needed to sleep, so I did.

Hermione was talking to me again, slowly. I'd been in a crash. The Rocket Broom had crashed and I had banged my head really badly. I felt sad. I held her, or she held me, and I felt sad.

For two weeks, little flashes of consciousness mashed together, out of time and sequence, to make up a sort of thread that I lived by. Finally, two weeks after getting onto the Rocket Broom, I accepted it had crashed. I was in my room at the clinic and I was holding Hermione's hand.

Hermione had been a constant presence and, without realising it, I'd come to rely on her as I rely on air and water. She was more than sustenance. She was my refuge, shield, and strength. She was my interpreter, translator of all my difficult and confusing emotions. How these roles drained her, I can only ever try to imagine.

When she left the room, even if only for a few minutes, I stopped. She was living for two of us.

My memory was still badly damaged. This was not damage to my deeper memories. I knew who I was, I recognised my children, and I recognised my parents and siblings, but my day-to-day memory was still very much in the grip of post-traumatic amnesia.

This only added to the state of deep confusion that nagged away at me and I grew irritated when people reacted oddly to my questions and statements, unaware that it might be the tenth time I'd said it to them.

By the time I understood my condition, I was getting over it but the confusion that remained, the uncertainty that I couldn't trust my own perception of the world, was a frightening state to be in.

To know that I was in such a state made it worse.

The more aware I became, the more scared I got. I'll never forget struggling in the daze of what was a clinically confused state. I feel a need to hold on to the memory of what it felt like to make sense of the world.

I became horribly self-centred. My whole universe revolved around me.

It wasn't always terrifying. I wasn't in a constant state of dejection or horror; sometimes it was rather pleasant to bounce along and wonder what was for lunch when I'd only ordered it five minutes earlier. I'd wonder if Hermione would come back and we could see everybody else at the party I thought we were all at.

The main distress brought about by my condition was, sadly, to be felt by the people closest to me. At one point early on after the move to the clinic, I became suddenly aware of the pain I had caused Hermione, my children, my parents and the rest of the family. I'd done something very stupid and upset a lot of people and I felt such a weight of guilt that I thought it would crush me.

To be honest, in my darkest moments, I hoped it would.

This guilt is apparently a common thing for people recovering from injuries like mine. Later on, I would be crippled with a second wave of guilt as I thought about how I had been so lucky when so many other people with similar injuries were not.

I would stare up at the ceiling in the middle of the night and torment myself that I had come out of such a massive catastrophe relatively unscathed and, eventually, well, while people suffered worse injuries and permanent damage simply falling down the stairs.

That guilt was much harder to fight against and I still carry it today.

With my returning memory and confidence, the problem arose of finding something to fill my days at the clinic. I didn't want to go back to work at that time. I couldn't really understand the concept of work, not in an adult way. I knew that work was something I did, out there in the real world, and I knew that I had to be grown up because I had children and a wife and a house that I needed to earn money to pay for.

I wanted to play.

I was overcome by the desperate need to get somebody to go into the attic back at The Burrow and dig out my childhood Sticklebricks just so I could feel them in my hands again. I remember Mum always finding odd ones here and there as I was growing up. She would say that her children would always outgrow their Sticklebricks and leave them in their past but she would never be able to. As soon as my mother took a chance and walked anywhere in her house barefoot, she would step on one and make the prickly, coloured bricks very much of the present!

When Mum visited me, I would be visibly expectant that she was about to give me something. Everybody picked up on the fact that I felt sure that visits from my Mum would be because of her needing to give me something. At the time, I didn't know that I was waiting for her to pull a box of Sticklebricks out of her handbag but, as I later put together my varied thoughts at that time, it's clear to me that this is what I was waiting for.

Poor Mum so desperately wanted to be able to give me what I was clearly longing for her to bring me but whenever she left and asked me if there was anything I'd like next time, I would draw a blank and shake my head.

Hermione walked in just as I was thinking about all the things I could make out of Sticklebricks and I came alive. We started talking about how she felt, how I felt, how the children were and what was happening on the outside.

By this time, I understood that my crash had caused a bit of a stir in the media. The Healers were still adamant that I be protected from over-stimulation so the newspapers and magazines were kept away from me. What they did allow was for Hermione to bring in a handful of the hundreds of letters and get-well cards from well-wishers for me to read.

At first, she would select a few and read with me and, as days went on, I was able to happily sit down and go through a whole stack of them alone.

Now, I must stress this wasn't like a celebrity opening fan mail and soaking up the adulation of people they've never met. I opened each letter as a normal bloke being wished well by kind friends would do.

Many of the letters were from people who had been similarly injured and were keen to share their experience with a fellow sufferer. I read an account from a teenage lad who had suffered a head injury during a fall from his broom during a backyard Quidditch game. He was, from his letter, clearly a tough kid who embraces the thrill of riding his broom competitively and yet he felt compelled to write and share the story of his accident and to talk about how deeply it had affected him and how hard it was to recover. In doing so, he must have rendered himself vulnerable in a way that would have been very uncomfortable for a teenager.

He didn't write to the bloke who did stunts on his broom to tell him about how fast he went on his own broomstick. He wrote to tell me not to be scared that I'd injured my brain because he had done the same thing and got better. It was a great source of comfort.

Hermione walked through the door one day, carrying a large, brightly coloured box. Something in me told me what it was even though I had no idea what the letters L.E.G.O. meant.

Hermione explained that Harry had bought it for me from a Muggle shop. He had guessed correctly that my tangled and confused mind would relish the simple but involved process of building a child's toy. It was a model of a tractor, a big green one, and the instructions were colourful and just challenging enough to demand my full attention.

I can only imagine how Hermione must have felt, once called the brightest witch of her age, as she sat and watched as her husband threw himself into a task aimed at somebody thirty years his junior. For me, the world came alive in a brightly coloured, technically demanding challenge.

I built my tractor.

Doctors visited and people brought food. I concentrated on the task and revelled in the achievement. I pleaded with Hermione to bring more Lego. She saw the good it was doing and hurried to the nearest Muggle toy shop.

Within days, my room had been transformed, filled with brightly coloured boxes of Lego as I buried myself in my newfound work. Hermione arrived once more, smiling as I looked up from the floor where I was busily building a ship.

She had brought the children.

I smiled at them and said hello. They advanced and said hello back. My heart leapt and then steadied. I asked them if they'd like to join me and play. They said yes and crouched down next to me.

I might have felt daft, asking my own children to play with me, but I didn't. With Rosie and Hugo around, I knew my place again. I was their father. I was in hospital because I'd suffered a head injury and I had to try not to upset them. I loved them more than anything else in the world, but I couldn't go home with them.

We played and talked and, with no sense of the passage of time, I was unaware of how long they'd been with me, when Hermione rose from her seat on the bed and announced that they had to go.

We walked to the lift, the four of us. Hermione pressed the button and, too quickly, the lift arrived. The children and their mother walked in. In the pause before the doors slid shut, I smiled at them as they stood, the three of them illuminated by the soft light inside the lift, making a warm picture framed by the metal doorway. As I watched, they smiled back.

As the doors began to slide together, Rosie broke her gaze from mine and turned her head to look up at Hermione. Her smile crumpled and her eyes filled with tears. She'd held them back for as long as she could. As she looked up to Hermione for support, her resolve not to cry failed. She succumbed; she was a five-year-old girl missing her daddy very much, scared and worried.

I looked at Hermione at the doors shut then I stared, for some time, at the space where my family had been. As I walked back to my room, I wept, too.

* * *

As I well and truly settled into the rehabilitation clinic, my care was handed over to the utmost specialist in recovering from brain injuries. He was called Brian, which amused my childish side because he always wore a name badge to help his patients with poor memories and I thought it looked as if he was wearing a badge with the word 'BRAIN' on it.

He soon became known to me and my family as the brain man.

He asked me how I was feeling and I assured him I was feeling very well indeed. He asked how my Lego Batmobile was going and I began to explain to him that it was pretty tricky in places and you had to pay close attention to the instructions. I pointed to the driver's seat and informed him that was where the bat would sit before pontificating on how such a small creature could hold onto the steering wheel and reach the peddles to drive.

It was only after a good few minutes of giving patient and comprehensive instruction of the fine art of assembling the Lego model that I realised that he was humouring me, and I was embarrassed for the first time in a long while. This was probably a good sign.

At some point, somebody had identified a need in me for physical exercise. I would go running nearly every day to maintain my fitness levels for work and, though I would benefit from it physically, it was more about how much better I felt mentally when I did it.

Given that I had suffered no lasting bodily injuries apart from those to my brain, I remained in reasonably good shape but I had lost a lot of weight. Now, I'm not exactly well built to begin with -- a long streak of piss is what Charlie affectionately calls me. So to slim down from an already wiry frame wasn't something I could pull off without looking emaciated.

I was asked if I would like to go to the physical rehabilitation room, where all the apparatus for the people who had to learn to walk and move again were kept, and exercise during the times when the room was empty. I bounced around like the ten-year-old I now found myself to be.

Hermione brought in my running trainers and a baggy grey t-shirt, along with my comfortable black jogging bottoms, ready for the big day. When the time came, a medi-wizard, who specialised in physical therapy, came to collect me and take me along the narrow corridors and empty staircases to the ground floor room where the patients who were at the clinic for physical rehabilitation resided.

This was the furthest I could recall travelling for what felt like years and I took in every new wall and door as if it was scenery. In the rehabilitation room, I was shown some moves for something Hermione tells me is called Yoga. The medi-wizard was very kind and I tried to show off by being really good at Yoga – I wasn't.

Then, he asked if I would like to use the rowing machine. It was like a boat that didn't go anywhere but it could put up different resistance to the oars so you could row with ease as you would on a calm lake or with as much difficulty as you would do on a stormy sea, heading into the wind.

I jumped at the chance and rowed on the smoothest setting for four minutes before knackering myself out, but it did feel great to be tired for a physical reason instead of it having something to do with my head.

I think the main benefit from the whole thing was the realisation that the Healers felt I was doing well enough to be allowed to work up a sweat. Yet again, it was more about the psychological effect of the thing I was doing than the task itself.

I dreamed of being able to take off on my own and run outside in the real world. I dreamed of running along tree-lined paths all scattered with golden leaves, clambering over fences to sprint across wide, muddy fields and to real skies with weather in them rather than the white ceilings and enchanted sunlight at my windows.

I wanted to be in the middle of nowhere and to not care or worry.

I was lightly sleeping, still trying to cling to my happy dreamscape, when I felt a loving hand caress my hair. It was soft and gentle and felt so very intimate. I hoped the stroking wouldn't stop.

Then, I heard a familiar voice, deep and masculine, in my ear.

"I just wanted to let you know I was here, that I came to see you, and I'm sorry I missed you."

Something in my brain clicked that it was Percy's voice and my whole body flinched in shock. The tender stroking of my hair became a cupping of my cheek and I really freaked out now. I blinked my eyes against the bright light streaming through the window and tried to focus on my brother to ask him what the bloody hell he was doing with all the 'touchy-feely' nonsense.

Before I could say anything, however, I heard the oh-so-familiar sound of George's laughter.

"You great prat, Percy," he was exclaiming through the laughter. "He thinks it's _you_ touching him!"

I rubbed the heels of my palms into my eyes and sat up, noticing Hermione's hands slipping down to the bed from my face and Percy sitting on the other side of the bed with his cloak on, ready to leave.

"I'm sorry. I really didn't mean to wake you up," Percy sputtered "The Healers told us how much you need your sleep and I didn't want to disturb you. I'm so sorry!"

George was doubled over with laughter, arms clutching his stomach and face crinkled with mirth, and I looked from my brothers to Hermione and blinked.

"It really was you?" I asked, needing confirmation from somebody who I knew would never lie to me.

"It was me the whole time, yes," she said, pinking in the cheeks and trying desperately not to laugh, too. "Percy never once did anything affectionate at all. He was the perfect Weasley brother."

George rocked back in his chair and tried to muffle his howls of laughter behind his fist with minimal success.

"I am aff...I'm very fond of all my brothers!"

"Please, stop, Perce...can't take it!" George whimpered through his giggles.

"We're just not _strokingly_ fond, are we Percy?" I grinned at him.

Hermione bit her lip and George beamed at me with pride. I didn't think it was that funny. Later on, Hermione told me that it was the first time I'd teased anyone since the crash. It was another little part of me coming back and they were very pleased to see it.

Percy straightened himself up and pushed his glasses up his nose with one finger before leaning over and kissing me on the forehead. George stopped laughing instantly and Hermione gasped. I just gaped at him.

"Well, now that I know how to shut the pair of you up, I'll have to pucker up more often," Percy said as casually as he would have asked us to 'Pass on my regards to Harry when you see him next,' and then he turned to leave.

As he passed George in his chair, he made a kissy-face at him, looked very pleased with himself, and then left without another word.

"The whole world's gone topsy-turvey," George said in astonishment. "Percy's _funny_!"

* * *

I'd recovered enough to leave. I was going to leave. The thing was, I couldn't go home.

It had been discussed but our house was being watched by the freelance Skeeter type of reporters who always seemed to emerge from the woodwork at such times and the brain man and my Healers were worried about how I might react.

I was still at risk of being over-stimulated and there was no way to tell if I was out of the woods as far as going into convulsions or suffering any other form of complication went. Statistically, with a brain injury the severity of mine, there were real dangers with giving me too much stimulus at that point.

So, a plan was hatched.

We were going to slip away, unnoticed and anonymously. We needed to be guaranteed privacy, a safe place from which I could walk slowly and carefully back into the world. With the help of Professor McGonagall, Hermione had found such a place in the highlands of Scotland. This was better than Christmas when I was five. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling and counting the minutes. When the knock on the door finally came, I was clutching at the bed sheets, desperate not to appear too keen or childish. I resisted the urge to leap from the bed as the figure entered the room.

"Is it time then?"

"Yes, let's go."

I grabbed my bag. I stuffed my treasured Lego sets inside and then thought about maybe packing as many clothes as I could fit inside, too. We stepped out into the corridor and I suddenly felt nerves grip my stomach.

"There's a car just outside," Hermione whispered to me in the dead of night, the clinic eerily dark and still.

"Are the children coming?" I whispered back.

"They're waiting in a Muggle motor home. We're driving there in the car," Hermione said as she stroked the hair at the back of my head, reassuringly. "Mum and Dad arranged everything. Muggles don't know who you are and it won't matter to them as long as they get paid."

"How m-" I began but she rested her forehead against mine and curled her fingers loosely in my hair.

"They've been paid in advance and Dad won't hear of you paying him back. You do lots for him for free and being Muggle, he's never been able to do anything for you before. Let him do this."

I swallowed and nodded. Her head moved with mine as her forehead was still resting against it. We both chuckled nervously.

Outside, I felt the fresh air hit me and I wanted to run and scream and jump around but I didn't. I heard a bird singing somewhere far away and, close by, a car waited for me.


	6. Chapter 6

**Reparo 6**

It's funny hearing Ron's version of leaving the clinic for good. He remembers his feelings and the sounds that he heard but other, more memorable things aren't there for him at all.

I had opened the door to Ron's room at about two in the morning, which was dark apart from the glow of a night light charm beside his bed, and his still form lay covered in blankets on the bed.

"Ron!" I whispered as loudly as I could while still being able to call it a whisper and he threw back the covers, fully dressed, wearing an enormous grin on his face. In a moment, he was on his feet and was hugging me.

"God, I missed you."

We filed out of the room and passed the medi-witch.

"Bye, good luck," she whispered.

"Thank you. Good-bye," I whispered with a smile.

I'd left a black, hooded jumper and some sunglasses in Ron's room and, despite his protestations, he wore them as he left the building.

"Who wears sunglasses at two o'clock in the morning?" he grumbled at me.

It was a few steps from the door to the waiting car and he had to keep his head well down as we drove away, just as if we were Muggle relatives visiting a magical loved one at the clinic, in case anybody was watching.

Once we were on the motorway, he clung onto me and told me about the game he'd played with the medi-witch who'd kept coming in to check on him. He hadn't slept a wink and pretended to snore whenever she entered the room.

"Old habits die hard, eh?" I smiled, remembering that this wasn't the first time Ron had played such a game with a woman he wanted to get away from.

By three, we were at the camper van. The children were jumping around, utterly ecstatic to see their daddy and not the least bit sleepy.

I'll hand the story back to Ron again, now. His memory gets better for a while here.

* * *

It was as if colour had been poured into my world again. I clung onto the children, tired but too alive to sleep, and held them until they dozed off with their heads on my chest. Hermione sat next to me on the sofa bed and we talked softly about our lives together and how this experience might change things.

"What if I can't fly anymore?"

"Does the thought of getting on a broom again worry you?" Hermione asked.

I thought for a moment and then shook my head. I wanted to go flying. As soon as I found out we were going to the Highlands of Scotland, my first thought had been to ask if I could take a broom with me. I imagined flying across the landscape with the open sky being so welcoming and free.

"It's like..." I paused to try to get my head straight, "I've splinched myself, really badly once, and it didn't stop me from Apparating."

"It did make you more careful," Hermione said as she rubbed her thumb against the scar tissue on my upper arm. "You take extra care when you Disapparate, I've noticed."

My eyes down turned, feeling suddenly ashamed and embarrassed.

"I can't ever drink mead though, can I? It makes me gag," I said in a mumble.

"That's different," Hermione said as she curled herself into my side and rested her head on my shoulder. "You were choking, being poisoned. It was the mead doing it and not anything you had control over. You can control your Apparition."

I nodded.

"I can control a broom," I said with confidence.

"You definitely can," she said, squeezing me tightly. "You read those cards and letters from the people in the crowd, the people you managed to avoid."

"I dunno what I would have done if I'd hurt anyone else," I said, feeling shaky at the very thought.

"All those people, all the papers, everybody thinks you are incredible. You had under a second to save their lives and you did. You managed to steer a broom that you yourself had said could do nothing but go in a straight line."

"I wouldn't call _crashing_ steering," I said, only half joking.

"I would," Hermione said before hiding her face in the side of my neck. "I'd call it sacrificing yourself...again."

"Maybe it'll be like it was after you had Rosie," I offered, trying desperately to think of something to take her mind off all the times I've nearly died on her, "Y'know, like that period of time when you thought you could never have sex again?"

It worked and she laughed into my neck before looking up at me.

"Not exactly the same thing but I do understand what you mean."

The Healers had reassured us that, though it would be long and difficult, I would recover fully. At that moment, I was in too fragile a state to ever imagine feeling normal again. As the camper van rumbled through the night, I knew I had to try to relax my mind, take the pressure off my brain, and growing worried that the sudden rush of new experiences might prove to be too much.

I was scared again.

I sat still, closed my eyes, and waited for something to happen. I had no idea what a convulsion would feel like and with every rise in my emotions or slight physical sensation I imagined it was starting, that I was about to have a fit.

At the back of the camper van, there was a bedroom. The children had been impressed by the large double bed but thought the room needed an engorgement charm on it. Hermione had hushed them and reminded them that we were being driven by Muggles. I surveyed the bed from the sliding doors that led into the bedroom cabin.

There were windows at the head and to the side of it. Through the blinds, the lights from the motorway pulsed and flashed. I turned back to look into the main cabin and saw a similar pulsing flash coming in through the skylight.

Hermione looked up from where she was settling the children on the sofa bed, covering them up with a blanket.

"Go to sleep, darling, you'll be fine."

I felt too pale and too thin. Being scared had become almost constant state for me over the weeks. The feeling was made no more pleasant by its familiarity.

"Thing is," I said, brow furrowing, "I'm worried to death. Hermione, they tell you on that TV of yours how flashing lights are dangerous for some people. It can trigger epilepsy when it's just on the telly. If it can do that to normal Muggles sitting at home, then what about me now? And if I sleep in there," I pointed back to the bedroom, "the lights are flashing even more!"

"It'll be all right. I'll close the curtains."

Hermione rose carefully so as not to disturb Rosie and Hugo, to squeeze past me into the bedroom. She reached across the bed and pulled the curtains together. I caught myself following the curve of her back down to her bottom as she did, but felt too nervous to do anything to show my appreciation.

"There," she smiled at me, "that'll be fine."

"Thank you," I said, my voice small and pathetic. "I love you."

The room was dim now and Hermione was looking at me through the gloom.

"You'll be fine. The Healers know what they're doing and said you'd be okay. What you need now is some sleep. Remember, they told you the risks increase the more tired you get."

She pulled the bedcovers back and moved aside to make room for me in the snug bedroom cabin. I just had enough room to walk into the room and fall onto the bed.

"I'm sorry, I'm just scared. To come this far and then to..." I tailed off.

Exhaustion was taking over. I closed my eyes and Hermione padded out of the room. Sleep wouldn't come, though. As I grew frustrated at not being able to drift off despite how tired I was feeling, the dread of inevitability began to take over. I waited for a seizure to start.

The camper van thumped heavily over a ripple on the smooth surface of the road. I threw the covers off me and got up. I slid the doors open and Hermione came back in.

"I can't sleep! Too scared. This is the worst ide... I just don't think I should be doing this."

"You want to go back?"

"No! Godric no, but I jus... Maybe we should go back. This is a stupid idea. They said no flashing lights, no sudden noises and listen to it."

We both stood in complete silence and Hermione's eyes shifted awkwardly as we both waited for this massive din I was ranting about to occur. It didn't stop my angry outburst, though.

"When the camper goes over a bump, there's a huge noise. I'm gonna have a fucking fit and then I'm gonna be stuck with them for my whole life and I'll lose my Apparition licence and I won't be able to Floo anywhere or fly, which means bye-bye job and we'll be fucking ruined. Why didn't you just take me home? We could have snuck in somehow and stayed there until everybody went away. We'd be in our warm, cosy house right now. Who would have spotted me anyway? Who cares if some nobody who fell off his broom and banged his head goes home? This is the worst thing you could have done to me. Just leave me the fuck alone and I'll stay in here and stay awake. You go out there and get some sleep and I'll...be in here...awake."

She stood, gripping the edge of the door. I was attacking her and blaming her for everything. The Healers had warned her that patients recovering from head injuries can suffer from anger and rage. This had to have been what was happening to me. We both knew it and the knowledge made me angrier.

I wasn't cross because of the bang on the head. I was cross because everybody wanted to kill me, to make me mad, to ruin all the hard work I'd done to make myself better. It was all going to go wrong just because people didn't think.

"Darling, get some sleep," Hermione said in a soft and warm voice. "Please."

She placated me quietly and confidently. I lay back on the bed, pulling the covers over my head to block out the lights, waiting to be gripped by a seizure. I wondered what it would feel like. Would Hermione know or would I just seize up solid and die?

The road rumbled away beneath the bed as we travelled from one world and into another.

* * *

As I left Ron in the bedroom, I realised he'd broken the sliding door off its runners. It could be easily fixed with a flick of the wand but with two Muggles taking turns driving us from one end of Britain to the other, I couldn't risk it.

I tried to fix it myself but it was too heavy and to try to force it would have made more noise for Ron to obsess about. Just my looking at the door appeared too loud for him.

"For fuck's sake!" he hissed from under the covers.

While it had been something of a relief and a breakthrough for Ron to have come back to himself enough to be able to rant the way he had, it still twisted my heart a little. I could never stand it when he was angry with me.

One of the foundations of our whole relationship had been the love of verbally tussling with each other. I love the challenge of trying to get him to see my point of view and he loves to get me flustered. He never wants to back down and I always crave to win every argument I'm involved in.

We bicker for fun. We argue until we either burst out laughing or throw ourselves at each other just to shut the other one up. More than anything, we never shy away and agree with something we don't believe in just because it's easier. If I settled for the easy way, I would never have been lucky enough to become Ron's wife and if he had settled, then he would have believed himself worthless and would be living a miserable and unfulfilled life.

Arguing, squabbling, whatever it is people think we do, I know that it's good for us. I know that it was good for Ron to explode at me the way he had done. I know how destructive it is for Ron to keep his negative feelings inside at the best of times, let alone when he's feeling fragile and his mind is vulnerable.

He mentioned earlier that I have a name for him when he holds the bad feelings in, Muggins. As soon as I recognise Muggins creeping in, I try to snap him out of it. This wasn't the same, not this time; this was genuine fear. Back when Ron had really been walking a fine line, where a fall one way could lead to the end of his life and leaning the other could keep him alive, he was oblivious to his own peril. Now that he was on the mend, and everyone around him were finally able to relax in the knowledge that we had him back safely and that he was going to be fine, Ron was being slammed with the terrible, delayed terror of dropping dead at any minute.

From blissful ignorance to constant anxiety that he was seriously ill and none of us were taking his condition seriously.

From being the only person he trusted, even when he didn't know who I was, to being his Hermione – who didn't appear to care if he had a seizure or not.

He needed to sleep otherwise something really would go wrong.

I wasn't able to fix the door and needed to be sure I was close by if he needed me. I couldn't join him in the bed because the door would slam; I had only one option. I sat on the floor, hand between the door and its closing point, bracing myself against the wall so I couldn't slide down if I fell asleep.

I stayed there through the night. Sometimes grappling with the door when it slipped from my grasp and once or twice losing it altogether and waking as it slammed, dully, on my fingers.

Dawn came, so at least I had some visible scenery to look at, and with it, the promise of a sunny day.

I sighed and watched my husband sleeping. I could always tell if he was genuinely asleep just by the way his arms and legs were spread out all over the bed. The covers were bunched up just above his backside and his t-shirt had ridden up with his usual night-time tossing and turning.

He really had lost a lot of weight.

He always looked as if he needed feeding, and delighted in eating what fussy maternal women offered him. So mothers like his, mine, and all the women from Rosie's nursery school and Hugo's playgroup loved him. The old me might have been jealous if it hadn't been so amusing.

He would come home, with Hugo on his shoulders and Rosie running around under his feet, and have more chocolate on his face than both his children combined. Hugo would tell me about his friend Robert's mummy bringing in sticky buns for all the children and how she also made one for daddy. Easter came and Maggie's mummy made chocolate bird nests full of tiny chocolate eggs and Ron got one of those, too. Every birthday cake was divided up so everybody got a piece with Ron getting the biggest.

One Christmas, I picked up Rosie and was presented with a mince pie from every mother waiting at the gates. I was about to ask them if there had been some kind of mince pie exchange thing I hadn't been given a letter about, when each woman grinned at me and told me to say Merry Christmas to Ron.

As I said, I could have been jealous but it was simply too funny. To the other children, Ron was a big kid -- Hugo's funny daddy who would hold them upside down by their ankles or grab an arm and a leg, spinning them in circles like a 'hairy plane.' To the mothers, Ron was as amiable and adorable as a puppy dog and there's nothing a bunch of sappy dog lovers like more than to sneak little treats to a bouncy little pup.

I never was a dog person. Not until Ron, of course. Not until Ron, his Patronus and his annoyingly loveable beagle.

Sometimes dogs and cats can live together happily. On the outside, people think all they do is fight but it _is_ possible for a cat and a dog to lay in the shade on a hot summer day together or before a fireplace in the dead of winter. They can enjoy the other for their differences.

Right now, I was the cat who got put out all night and scratched at the door to get back in while Ron was the lolloping Great Dane, with huge floppy ears covering his face, sprawled out across his master's bed without a care in the world. I wouldn't have it any other way.

We were all together; we were a family again.

Ron had been nervous the previous night but that was understandable. He'd been nowhere but hospital rooms for the past three weeks or so. External stimuli had suddenly overwhelmed him, but he'd managed, he'd overcome it, he'd be okay.

I yearned to climb into the bed with him, to hold him and reassure him, but he needed as much rest as possible. The best I could do for him now was to remain where I was with my crumpled fingers in the door.

* * *

I woke to find that the camper van was still ploughing onward but the light of the new day had ended the flash of the passing streetlamps. The terrors of the evening were gone.

Rosie and Hugo were still sleeping. Hermione sat on the floor by the door, holding it open, looking tired and strained. When she saw I was awake, she got up, crawled over the bed, and kissed me good morning.

"Morning, darling. You finally got some sleep then?"

"Yeah... Yes, thank you. Sorry about shouting. I was scared."

I hung my head like a scolded schoolboy.

"I know, it's fine."

I took her hands with mine and she squeezed them tightly.

"Where are we?" I asked as I leaned forward to look through the door and along the camper van, through the front windscreen. On either side of the road were gentle rolling hills.

"We're in Scotland, just coming upon some mountains if you wanted to..."

I nodded and got up. We walked through to the kitchen area of the camper van and I held onto the countertop as the mountains came into view. The sky was clear and blue and I felt the itch in my bones to go for a fly. Some people wake up and want coffee; I want fresh air.

"What time is it?"

"It's only nine, darling," Hermione said as her fingers wove into my hair from behind. "You slept for four hours though, well done."

"Right, good, what time do we get there?" I felt tired again and hungry.

"The drivers say around half-past four."

"Half-past four!" I exclaimed. "All this driving and we still have seven hours to go? We're in Scotland, you already said!"

"Yes but Scotland has lots of hills and mountains to drive around which is hard to notice when you Apparate, Floo and fly everywhere. Scotland's actually quite a big country."

My stomach growled.

"You hungry?" Hermione frowned.

"Yes, what have we got?" I said as I turned to look around the kitchen area hopefully.

"Nothing," Hermione said, brightly. "But we can stop. We can get whatever you want."

Suddenly, and for the first time, I felt gripped by a new paranoia. I didn't want to see anyone. The idea of meeting people I didn't know made my stomach churn and twist. I didn't even want there to be two strange Muggles driving the camper van. I was terrified of them, terrified of anyone I didn't know.

I don't know if I was more readable than usual or if it was just that Hermione knows me so well she can guess what I'm thinking before I've even thought it, but she wrapped her arms around my waist and told me not to worry.

"I'll pick up as much of your favourite stuff that I can carry okay?"

"Okay."

"It'll be a Muggle shop," she said, and even though her face was resting against my back I knew she was smiling.

"Ooh," I gasped. "Get some Monster Munch!"

"Which one, pickled onion, beef or flaming hot?"

I gave her one of the smiles I usually reserve for the mums at Rosie's nursery school or Hugo's playgroup and she rolled her eyes.

"Fine, I'll see if they have one of those multipacks and you and the kids can fight over them."

With the thought that I was going to get a big bag filled with all flavours of my favourite Muggle crisps, I found that I couldn't wait until we pulled over somewhere.

It was a quarter-past four when we arrived at the cottage we'd rented for three weeks. As we walked into the bright yellow house, a roaring fire and mugs of steaming hot tea greeted us. I immediately excused myself and made my way to the master bedroom, already exhausted.

The routine soon established itself: the natural order in which our days fell, the ebb and flow of waking up, eating breakfast and going for a walk. We had a daily 'whatever the weather' walk and the children loved it.

Hugo would splash along happily in his wellies and Rosie would squeal and run, squelching through the mud. Hermione and I would follow on behind, under a big umbrella, wet but not too cold.

"It's very wet rain, isn't it?" I declared, knowing exactly what I meant but obviously not at my most articulate.

Hermione found it amusing enough though, so I pretended I'd said it to be funny.

* * *

Ron talked to me more openly than he had ever done in his life during those walks in the woods. Even our talk after Fred's funeral wasn't as naked as those were. The most intensely honest and heartbreaking discussion we'd had before then had been when Ron had told me something I can't write down or ever speak of again. Along with his many near-death experiences, Ron had endured mental torture at the hands of the darkest evil we ever came upon in our lives, you know who I mean, and it took him years before he could tell me about it.

Even that paled into comparison to the talks we had as we sat on the log at our favourite picnic spot.

"I've been really ill, haven't I? It's still bad."

"Yes but you're getting better. You've improved so much in such a short time. You should be proud of yourself."

He sat there with his cup of tea resting on his knee.

"I kept thinking there was nothing wrong with me, that I was a fraud and everyone was being nice to me under false pretences, but they weren't, were they?"

I shook my head. He nodded his.

"I know that now," he said before looking down into his mug of tea.

It was beyond sad; it was heartbreaking. He was surrounded by all this beauty, yet he still felt so awful.

"I don't want to get stuck the way I used to be, a miserable, bloody teenager. I hated how I made myself feel in those days. I hated how I made other people feel."

He looked at me as he spoke those last few words and I put my arm around him.

Ron's memory was coming back to him so fast now. It was as if a blockage had been cleared and all the stuff that had been backed up was fighting its way back through the channels in his mind. Thoughts and experiences were trying to fit back into the places they belonged. Huge blocks of memory would suddenly fall into his head and it was quite alarming for him each time it happened.

He would never know when to expect a huge blank to be filled with years of experience in amazing detail.

He walked into the kitchen, having just repaired Rosie's kite and sent her back outside with Hugo to have another go at flying it without shattering it against the trunk of a tree, leaned over the biscuit barrel on the table to see if we had any Bourbons left and then froze. Just as I was about to draw breath to ask him what was wrong, he burst into tears and clamped his hand to his mouth.

I leapt up and grabbed him, hugging him tightly and rubbing his back, trying to find out what was so wrong so suddenly. He was sobbing with his whole body and it was the worst sound I could have imagined ever coming from such an uplifting person as Ron. Again and again, I asked him what had upset him so dreadfully and eventually he found breath enough to tell me what had just come back to him as fresh as the day it happened.

"Fred's dead," he said, whole body shaking in my arms, "Never coming back dead. He's gone."

"He is, I'm sorry," I said, tears flowing uncontrollably down my own face now as I held him to me and helped him grieve for his brother all over again.


	7. Chapter 7

**Reparo **

**Epilogue**

This was a moment to savour. I scanned the bruised skies above the dense green of the conifers.

"You won't overdo it?" Hermione asked, worrying her hands on the front of my sweatshirt.

"No, I learned in hospital that I shouldn't just throw myself in. I shall be sensible and moderate," I said, as if reciting a well-memorised warning from the back of one of the Wheezes firework boxes, before smiling and winking at her. "Honest."

She smiled back at me.

"Really, you'll be sensible? How long do you think you'll be?"

"Ummm...about twenty minutes," I guessed, picking a duration of time out of thin air, as I stretched my calf muscles. "I'll head towards the picnic place and see how far I get."

She looked worried again.

"I'll tell you what," I said. "I'll just run in that direction for ten minutes, turn around and come back. It's better than trying to find a route that lasts twenty minutes, eh?"

I pulled my 'winning Hermione over' face hopefully.

"Take care, darling," she said with a resigned shake of the head and a light chuckle.

"I will, don't worry. I don't want anything to go wrong any more than you do. See ya."

I trotted up the track towards the hills. The sense of freedom was immense. I could go wherever I wanted. My trainers pounded against the stony ground. Ahead of me, there was a bridge, a forest, and any number of other places I could now wander off into on my own.

I chose the forest. I liked the way the branches formed a protective shelter above me. Inside, the air was damp and strongly scented. I could hear the distant stream on my left and I ran towards the sound. Soon, I saw a short, wooden bridge crossing the trickling water and headed for it.

Having crossed over and past the river, the noise of the water faded behind me. After another hundred yards or so, I found myself running past our picnic place. It thrilled me to have found another route to somewhere I already knew. It was both new and familiar at the same time, even comforting in a way.

I knew this spot and could see the evidence of my children playing along with the log I would sit with my wife every day. However, I was alone now and just a bloke on a run passing by a clearing.

It was normal.

I ran up a slight hill and felt the muscles in my legs strain as I reached the crest. It hurt but it felt good to be pushing myself, making myself work. With my heart racing faster, spurred on by the thrill of what I was doing, I pushed on to yet another hill. This one was higher, steeper, but I pressed onwards with determination and euphoria.

I measured my breathing against my heartbeat and felt satisfaction in the double-time rhythm reverberating against my chest. The trees flashed by faster and I wondered what would happen if the light blinking through branches became some sort of stroboscope (I learned that word from Hermione and try to drop it into conversations as often as possible to sound clever) and triggered a fit.

What would I do?

Would I collapse and die immediately or would I fall into a damp ditch and die slowly of exposure?

I didn't care now. I felt no fear at the prospect. What would happen, would happen. I was running and it felt good. My confidence rose. I laughed out loud and threw my arms above my head before taking a new path that dropped off downward into the muddy woods. Dipping down through the trees, I splashed through muddy puddles, laughing more and breathing deeply.

Ahead lay a tall fence and a wooden gate. I slowed my pace as I drew nearer and then stopped. There was no sign on the gate, no padlock; in fact, there was nothing there that indicated the gate was there to keep people out. It looked rather more as if it was there to keep animals in.

It was shooting ground and stags roamed wild. I could see nobody beyond the gate and the path was clear. I swung the gate open and closed it carefully before carrying on over the rise and down into more trees until the path narrowed. It was only a foot or so wide, uneven and broken.

As I ran, my thoughts levelled and grew calmer. This was what I needed. This would help more than anything else. Just one tiny thought floated in to disturb my newfound calm.

_Did I close the gate?_

Well, yes, I remembered carefully latching the dull, light metal clasp...but I didn't trust my memory. Had I really closed it or was I imagining it?

Then another thought crashed into my head. Was this paranoia? The Healers had warned that one of the side-effects to my injury might be paranoia, along with compulsive behaviour patterns. Was I being compulsive? Was this burning desire to run back up a substantially muddy hill to check a gate that I knew for a fact I'd closed only minutes earlier compulsive behaviour?

Was I being paranoid about my compulsion?

That was it. I turned and set off back up the hill. 'Bugger it', I thought. 'If it's going to send me mad worrying about it, I'll check the gate anyway. Whether it's paranoia, compulsive behaviour or a latent desire to sleep with my Magical History teacher'.

I ran back up the hill. The gate was shut and I felt weak, broken and ashamed.

* * *

Ron had been gone for far too long on his run. Half an hour had passed and I was worried as it was starting to get dark. I told the children to put their wellies on and that we were going for a walk. They'd just started to argue about who was going to sit on the stool to pull on their brightly-coloured boots first when the front door opened.

A sweaty, muddy Ron stood in the doorway.

"Hello. Did you have a good run?" I said with alarming brightness as I took my coat back off.

"It was okay. Where are you three off to?" he panted.

For a second I considered lying, but only for a second and moved closer so the children couldn't overhear me.

"I was about to come and look for you. You've been quite a while and I was beginning to get worried."

"Oh Merlin, I'm sorry." He was almost cringing before me.

"Don't be silly. I'm just being my usual worry-too-much self. Where did you go in the end?"

Pulling me aside, Ron recounted the episode with the gate, worried that he was completely, chronically paranoid.

"Y'know, I couldn't begin to tell you the number of times I do stuff like that," he admitted. "Re-checking stuff I absolutely _know_ I've already done."

"It's just like the lost wand syndrome. Remember what Brian told you? People in recovery have to remember not to get caught up in that. Every time you've misplaced your wand in the past, you haven't instantly assumed you've got permanent brain damage. You've simply misplaced your wand."

"I just had to check the gate," he said, nodding his head in understanding of what had happened to him on his run. "It's normal."

I cupped his face in my hand and kissed him lightly on the lips.

The evenings in Scotland were often my most feared part of the day. Most nights, Ron would be in a bad mood. He suffered a very real problem with confrontation and negativity, which angered him and would set the tone of the evening.

Most nights were spent playing Exploding Snap or reading: books for me and Quidditch magazines for Ron, while the children were tucked up in bed. We'd while away about an hour before sharing a bath and then climbing into bed ourselves. We were both tired.

Ron would lie in late in the mornings, waiting until he could smell the bacon and eggs before getting up and joining me and the children in the kitchen. We were at the breakfast table one morning when he suddenly stopped eating, sat bolt upright, his face contorted into so many different expressions it really was very strange to watch.

"Oh...OH!" He looked like he'd just stepped off a fairground ride that had made him dizzy.

"You okay? What's up?" I asked.

He didn't look like my Ron; his face was ashen and instantly aged ten years. Had I seen this man on the street I wouldn't have recognised him. It was so frightening. I sat, paralysed, hypnotised by this terrible uncontrollable force waiting for it to stop.

When it ceased, just moments later, he was bewildered and confused. All I could do was hold him. Ron explained that as he'd sat there, quietly eating a piece of toast, out of nowhere, about ten different emotions hit him all at once. He was bombarded by them from deep within himself.

I felt it was his body's way of reminding us that it wasn't over yet and it was going to be difficult, very difficult, but we'd get through it.

* * *

It's now eleven months since I sat in a kitchen in Scotland and freaked out as all my emotions hit me at once over a piece of hot, buttered toast.

I can even daydream now. My mind wanders and roams as freely as ever it did. I'm no longer terrified of strangers and I can get through a day without needing a nap.

My emotions remained tricky for a while. I was still at the whim of whatever powerful emotion struck me at any time, often for no good reason. Sometimes though, I could recognise these phantom emotions for what they were.

I wandered across the garden at The Burrow some months ago and saw, from the corner of my eye, the old broom shed. I must have thought to myself how much I loved playing in there when I was little, because seconds later, I was overwhelmed with a great flood of love. It charged up through my chest to dominate everything, just as it does when I think about my children.

I had, briefly, fallen in love with my dad's broom shed!

It was sincere, too, as real as any other feelings of love, but it was yet another phantom emotion. I was lucky, I could recognise it for what it was, understand how it had come about, and untangle myself from it.

That incident was pretty much the last time I had any such struggle. My emotional checks and balances are back now and I'm not likely to fall head over heels for a rickety wooden shed again.

The Healers, medi-witches and wizards and Brian the Brain Man had saved my life, gave me back my mind. I then had to re-learn how to use the fully functioning brain they had given back to me.

I did get back in the air again and, strangely enough, my flying improved. Yes, there were times at first when I battled demons inside, but through every long, tough mile, I was filled with relief, accepted the painful fears and flew on.

I got back to the ACD, too. My team of Aerial Combat Aurors cooked up a few jokes for my return and we made light of the whole accident but at the same time everybody knew they were dealing with something difficult and sensitive.

This isn't a sad or miserable story, not by a million miles. The lessons I've learned have far outweighed the misery. Of course, there are thousands of people out there who aren't so lucky. I would visit the rehabilitation clinic for check ups with Brian the Brain Man and see many other brain injury patients working through their own problems.

You can't see that somebody has damaged their memory, their emotions, and their personality. They may look perfectly well on the outside but be suffering all manner of turmoil on the inside. Both the best and the worst thing was when people would look at me, assume I was fine, and carry on as if nothing had ever happened.

It was great to be able to forget about the accident and move on, but at the same time, I needed people to understand the trouble I might be having doing ordinary stuff.

I asked Hermione, at one point in my recovery, to make me a t-shirt that on one side read, 'I'm okay, please stop asking,' and on the back read , 'I'm still bloody poorly y'know?'

I think by now, I could lose the panel on the back and just have, 'I'm fine, thanks' printed on both sides.

The one thing that's never been a pain, though, is when people come up and ask how I am. Every time a pleasant, middle-aged lady I've never met before walks up to me, puts her hand on my arm, looks into my eyes and asks how I am, it's as though an aunt has given me a big hug and asked the same question.

It's comforting and healing, if only because it's a reminder that it's rather nice to be a human being, after all. It also got me a hell of a lot more attention from the mums at Rosie's nursery school and Hugo's playgroup!

And so, life gets ever closer to returning to what was normal for us. Of course, as our normal includes days when I call out goodbye to Hermione and the children as I set out to fly to the North Pole, cross the English Channel in a floating van, or even head the stunt display team on another demonstration, we can never entirely relax.

I was clear to Apparate again in good time, largely because I never once succumbed to a seizure, and I was also given the nod to get back onto a broomstick again. When that happened, I grabbed my trusty broom, Beardo's old custom-made Quidditch broomstick, and cruised around the countryside near our home.

Hermione even climbed on the back and came with me; that says a lot considering she hates flying. Everybody had been very worried about possible flashbacks and repercussions when I first flew again. In fact, it never really crossed my mind.

What happened to me happened on a Rocket Broom. It was really not much difference to me having ridden a firework that wasn't designed to explode. If I'd kicked off from the ground and only been able to go in a straight line, eyelids flapping about behind my head, I might have had a bit of a moment.

This was just flying and, as always, I loved it.

We laughed a lot during that flight, as did Rosie and Hugo when I took them up a few feet, several days later.

"Daddy, are you going to be flying?" Rosie grinned.

"Yes, yes, I am because the Healers said I can now."

"Cool!" Hugo beamed before he as his sister sat in silent, exaggerated concentration.

"Daddy," they both asked together in their sing-song voices.

"Yes," I said, trying not to laugh and spoil their clearly rehearsed joke.

"Don't go upside down and bang your head again, will you? We'll all have to go to the hospital then and who will look after the animals?"

They laughed, and laughed, and laughed at their joke. It's a routine we always go through every time we pile into the Muggle car I bought and charmed to fly whenever we want to go on a family trip together.

In answer to their question, I always say that no, I won't go and do that again, and if I can help it I shan't.

And sitting beside me as I write that, as she has been beside me now through the highest and lowest points in my life, and the moments when it looked like it very well might end, is Hermione. The impact of any such accident is felt, initially, by the person at the front line, the one turned into a patient by it, but from that point on it becomes a burden to be carried those closest to them.

So I thank my parents, my brothers and sister, and my friends for being there when I needed them and I'm sorry for putting them through a tough time. My children were largely shielded from the hurt of it, but they missed their daddy and one day I'll be able to explain to them why and say sorry to them, too.

And to my Hermione, I can only ever say a simple thank you and dedicate the rest of my life to her.

* * *

_A/N My beta (the second one) got confused by the term poorly and changed it to poor._

_So just to be clear, poorly means ill and poor means poor._

_Glad you enjoyed my adaptation of the Hammonds' story. I'm taking a bit of a break from multi chapter fics for a bit but will post some one shots when I have them._


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